Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News was quoted as saying that the soap operas have increased the country's influence abroad, especially in the Balkans and the Middle East, furthering the so-called soft power of Turkish diplomacy.

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.