I am...guilty for having introduced the idea of the importance of India’s “soft power” into the public discourse of our country... My rationale for applying the American academic Joseph Nye’s ideas to India... lay in my conviction that India’s biggest asset in the world was not merely our rising power...

The United States faces many obstacles in foreign policy, but major one is growing anti-American sentiment. Studies show that global opinion toward the United States has plummeted since 2002. But we can address this problem through soft power diplomatic approaches like international education.

NATO has a public diplomacy department staffed with smart and dedicated people, but it became apparent at a conference on “The Power of Soft Power,” held recently in Brussels, that this contingent is increasingly lonely.

BRUSSELS --- Since its founding in 1949, NATO has been a bastion of hard power, first as an alliance arrayed against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, and more recently as a manifestation of Western muscle in conflicts such as Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011. Coming off its decisive performance in helping to end the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, NATO seems to be happily basking in macho glory.

BRICS, grouping Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has set a distinctive example of great powers rising with "soft power," said Boris Martynov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Latin America Institute.

And all of this may in the end be an attribute of America's vaunted soft power - our foreign policy is not made in a hermetically sealed environment by wise-men-for-life but rather rises from the give and take of our democratic process, which at the end of the day is open to all.

Many Indian analysts accept their country is unlikely to make good the economic and developmental gulf that separates the two regional rivals, but say that India's "soft power" and "cultural influence" is an advantage.

“The cultural dynamism, the monetary stability, the process of social inclusion — all of that makes Brazilian culture a very valid pathway for the exercise of soft power, a way to make our society better known and better understood by others,” said Celso Lafer, a former foreign minister who is also an author and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.