There is a lot of talk on Capitol Hill about "smart power" and "soft power" but when it comes to funding programs like the Peace Corps, lawmakers hesitate, or they do not understand how an extra $10 or $20 million dollars is transformative...

China may have no intentions of using its growing military might, but that is of little comfort for Western countries. From the World Trade Organization to the United Nations, Beijing is happy to use its soft power to get what it wants -- and it is wrong-footing the West at every turn.

Today, the State Department is reaching out to foreign publics in partnership with major private sector partners including Jazz at the Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music as well as maintaining its own program of visits, exhibitions and tours.

Positive economic data alone cannot upgrade the national image. A series of latest episodes in Korea showed that soft images may be more critical in shining the national image than hard data.

A number of youth groups from Taiwan are traveling to Central America during their summer vacation to increase cultural understanding between the two sides. A foreign ministry official, Abel Lin, spoke about the purpose of the trips on Thursday.

What happened to China's much vaunted "soft power" and "good neighborly" diplomacy about which we have heard so much in recent years? China's supposed "soft power," always overstated, has passed from the scene in short order.

The introduction of television was a defining moment in Egypt and the Arab world. "We launched television in Libya, in Kuwait, in Aleppo and in Syria. We emerged as the cultural beacon of the Arab world," Abdel-Qader Hatem, Egypt's and the Arab world's first minister of information told Al-Ahram Weekly.

Underlying the hearts and minds strategy is a simple - and mistaken - assumption that aid projects will generate goodwill towards the US and reduce local support for terrorists and militant Islamist ideology. However, in our conversations we found no evidence that the US has been winning hearts and minds.