As Turks returned Monday from a month of fasting and holidays over Ramadan, their government proudly declared the amount of aid they had gathered together to send to fellow Muslims in Somalia: More than $237 million. Turkey has made no secret of its desire to increase its influence in the Middle East and Muslim Africa.

A carrier of culture will not be popular worldwide if it is unpopular in its own country. For example...the Peking Opera does not enjoy much popularity among contemporary Chinese youth. China should make practical efforts to foster the people's interest in the Peking Opera, both at home and abroad, in hopes that someday this art form will be as popular in the West as the Western opera is in China.

Rather than focusing on meaningful strategy, Washington's policy elites appear to have spent the past decade obsessed with finding a winning narrative. Grand strategy should be about connecting ends and means on a global scale that transcends administrations and their peculiar obsessions and preoccupations, whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, or China...In all cases, it still lacks a coherent vision grounded in a realistic grand strategy.

It will seem as if Ankara is trying to obtain a result it was not able to within the U.N. system by using its military power whereas up until today it was trying to expand its sphere of influence through its soft power.

A... historical soap opera based on the life of... Suleiman the Magnificent, it’s just one of more than 100 shows produced last year by Turkey’s booming TV-drama industry. The programs are becoming a wildly popular cultural phenomenon across the Middle East, bringing in their wake a renaissance in Turkey’s soft power and ushering in a low-key social revolution among the housewives of the Arab world.

Small contractors that focus on the civilian tools of national security, such as diplomacy and law enforcement rather than weapons development, have found a valuable niche in recent years, growing exponentially as the Pentagon deployed these skills in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Either Europeans will develop the security and defense identity they have advertised for so long, so Europe can have its own credible voice in a world not only run by soft power, or given the expense and difficulties of defeating even Libya, they will simply stop trying. The jury is out, but the verdict is important.

The youth here dislike the armed forces. They are confused and susceptible to being radicalised. Unemployment level is high. It is a challenge dealing with them and that is why we are focusing on the soft power aspect. We have held interactions with students from Kashmir University and are now tapping into the National Cadet Corps, sensitising them.