Pentagon officials talk about “demilitarizing” US foreign policy, which one can understand after the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the conventional wisdom now puts too much weight on “soft” power. We should not overestimate how much the world loves us because of our virtues, nor underestimate how much our influence still depends on hard power and our ability to provide protection in a pinch.

The U.S. force size in Asia-Pacific will increase...not to prepare for some Cold War-style showdown with a rising China... Obama seems to mean it when he talks about America's "Pacific Century," and putting a military presence there is a great way to extend U.S. hard as well as soft power.

Europe’s mastery of soft power seemed destined to eclipse military might in the post-Cold War age. The building of a continent “whole and free”...These days the European dream seems to be turning into a nightmare. The prospect of the euro’s collapse.

The film, “The Flowers of War...is Mr. Zhang’s take on the Nanjing Massacre. At the moment, no other cultural product or artist better embodies the hunger by the Chinese state and its citizens to create culture that can attract foreigners, bolstering China’s “soft power”...

A Chinese scholar recently said that China is catching up to the U.S. and is becoming a superpower. But according to a media survey, most Chinese don’t think so...The Chinese public’s pessimism about China’s rise as a superpower is shared by Chinese intellectuals...

The early 2000s did feel like the European moment... In this magazine in 2004, Parag Khanna described the "stylish" European Union as a "metrosexual superpower" strutting past the testosterone-fueled, boorish United States on the catwalk of global diplomacy.

On the first day of 2012, Chinese President Hu Jintao published an essay on culture in a...The language, lifted from Hu's speech at a party plenum on "promoting culture" in October last year, has been interpreted as largely hostile toward the "west" and its machinations to divide China.

Greek TV channels realised that buying the glitzy tales of forbidden love... from long-standing regional rival Turkey, was cheaper than filming their own..."Greeks feel closer to Turks than they did," he told Reuters. "Sometimes soft power is more important than political power."