U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have agreed to a meeting of U.S. and German security officials in the coming days to discuss allegations that the National Security Agency eavesdropped on 500 million phone calls, emails, and other data passing through Germany ... Foreign policy expert Sergey Lagodinsky, with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, suggests that, in the wake of the allegations, the Obama administration should consider public diplomacy.

Members of New York's Egyptian community descended on the coffee shops, delis and Hookah bars of "Little Egypt" on Wednesday to celebrate the overthrowing of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi after one year in office.

It’s Independence Day, which means celebrating our core values as a nation -- freedom from tyranny, constitutional democracy, prosperity. Which are also ‘brand values’ for the United States as a global venture. We promote and sell America to the world -- with music and movies, technology, leadership in international financial institutions such as the IMF and G-8.

In the desert city of Al Quweira, Jordan, Marines and sailors are making their best effort to maintain and renew regional cooperation with their Jordanian military counterparts through challenging training and in one particular case, through a spiritual gathering.

Apparently having trouble driving traffic to its websites, in 2011, State undertook a major campaign to boost its numbers, including buying sponsored ads to increase its English-language Facebook page “likes” from 100,000 to more than 2 million and to 450,000 on Facebook’s foreign-language pages.

The United States State Department spent $630,000 to increase the popularity of it's Facebook page over the course of two years, according to a recent report released by the department's Inspector General. Although the page gained nearly 2 million likes, State Department employees criticised the campaign for its failure to promote sustained engagement between the bureau and its target audience.

Werbel's new book Lessons from China: America in the Hearts and Minds of the World's Most Important Rising Generation chronicles her experiences in and out of the classroom. The book captures Werbel's Chinese students in their own words as they grapple with America's tragic and transcendent past and, in doing so, inevitably reflect upon their own country's past, present, and future.

The Snowden affair provides a teachable moment for a great many things, not least of them the need for robust U.S. public diplomacy. Today more than ever, global public opinion matters. The U.S. cannot conduct itself with disregard for how its actions will be perceived by the rest of the world; even public diplomacy at its best cannot fix bad policy. But modern public diplomacy is not at its best.