Plisetskaya’s U.S. debut came at a time when ballet made prominent headlines in America—in part because of its role as a tool of Cold War cultural diplomacy between the U.S. and Soviet Union—and dancers regularly became household names. The Bolshoi made the cover of Newsweek the week before we wrote about Plisetskaya’s arrival.

U.S. international media outreach is in a deep crisis in the period of intensifying anti-American propaganda, particularly on foreign pseudo-news websites and social media. It's a matter of concern for a lot of Americans, including, among others, former U.S. Secretaries of State George Shultz and Hillary Clinton. 

Two years after his election, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran is about to go down in history as a leader who defused an intense and bitter conflict that could have led to a military attack on Iran. A nuclear deal that the majority of Iranians hope will bring an end to the isolation of Iran, much needed relief from international sanctions, and a new chapter in U.S.-Iran relations is now in sight. If other enemy countries have faced each other on the battlefield and ultimately managed to work out their differences, why is it impossible for Iran and the United States to do the latter?

Western governments and institutions are scrambling to devise a commensurate response to Russia's state-run media offensive, analysts told The Moscow Times on Wednesday amid a wave of reports of Western governments seeking to beef up their own media capabilities.

On World Press Freedom Day, the United States pays special honor to the importance of media freedom - a crucial element of freedom of expression - at home and abroad. A diverse and independent press is crucial to holding governments accountable and sustaining democracy around the world. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) at the U.S. Department of State details the state of media freedom around the world in the Annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. 

U.S. and Iranian officials have been insisting the last several years that they wanted to resolve the nuclear issue before discussing the sectarian wars that are raging across the Middle East. Not anymore. As the battles have escalated in recent months, so has talk about regional diplomacy. 

China’s resilient authoritarianism – or at least Beijing’s continued adherence to a distinctively non-Western polity – has for the moment refuted the democratic “end of history.” Still, the first part of Fukuyama’s polarizing thesis, the liberal part in the “liberal democracy” declaration, has been celebrated by political pundits around the world as the irreversible path of humanity. The term “Chimerica” has been the epitome of the wishful thinking of liberal intellectuals around the world who deterministically infer that U.S.

Heading home from a weeklong visit to the U.S., Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stopped off Saturday morning for a nostalgic tour of USC, where he was a student in the 1970s. The brief visit to USC was Abe’s final event in the United States before he headed to Los Angeles International Airport, after a week of diplomacy and economic discussions.