The February issue of PDiN Monitor focuses on The Future of Public Diplomacy and will introduce a new structure for CPD's regular analysis of public diplomacy in the news. Beginning this month, CPD will graph overall trends in public diplomacy news aggregated daily in PDiN.

I am often told that Syria is not Libya and that any intervention would lead to a disproportionate death of civilians, making such an intervention unacceptable and unjustifiable. I would argue that the morality justifying the need for intervention in Syria is indisputable. First and foremost, innocent life is in danger and in need of protection. The Syrian Government has initiated an operation of large scale and systematic violation of human rights, with the UN stating that what the Syrian Government is doing amounts to crimes against humanity.

Swedes are being described as "handsome, hi-tech and healthy" in a global soft-power survey that ranks Sweden among the world's most influential nations....Sweden's new soft-power push is a plan to become Europe's leading gastronomic nation and double the nation's food export by 2020, according to the Monocle survey.

...Should America's hard power and divide-and-rule approach triumph, Africa may descend into one large theatre of war with many actors, chapters and a tragic ending. Should China's soft power and win-win economic approach triumph, this may end up becoming a truly African Century.

In order for soft power to be effective, however, you need a foundation of trust between countries. This can be a problem with traditional forms of cultural diplomacy, which are often perceived as being merely vehicles for sweetening the appeal of government policy. If a country is perceived to be overly self-interested as it deploys soft power, its efforts will fall flat.

Today’s NATO suffers from a public diplomacy overload rather than an image problem. Far from being a panacea to its democratic deficit, the dominant influence of public diplomacy strategies and their advocates on Allied decision-making is arguably part of the problem.

Thailand is now most of the way through the first term of the Obama administration, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has introduced and implemented the concept of "smart power" in relation to US foreign policy, which attempts to strategically combine elements from both "hard power" and "soft power" approaches.

...Turkey has a policy of outreach at the moment. It has been really active in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America using all its methods of soft power. And I’m sure that they would appreciate, would want better relations with China in spite of the differences that might be between them.