"Youth Excellene On Stage" is the theme of this workshop launched in 2009 jointly by the US Embassy in Thailand and a non-profit organisation, American Voices, with the aim to form a bridge between American and Thai cultures through the power of art and music, by providing budding Thai talents a chance to learn and master their skills from seasoned professionals.

APDS Blogger: Oscar Castellanos del Collado

Between January 29 and May 6, 2012, posters of Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait were hung from light posts around Los Angeles. The portraits served as invitations to “In Wonderland: the Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” the first co-organized exhibition by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art.

“The challenges that Ambassador McFaul is facing in Russia demonstrate how U.S. embassies that participate in social media are vulnerable to backlash from their host country. However, it is clear that Twitter is has become a valuable mechanism to circumvent traditional media channels and foster a direct dialog between foreign individuals and the U.S. government."

It was an exercise in grass-roots democracy in which sections of the public could question a political leader in public about issues of interest and concern to them. It was also an exercise in public diplomacy in which a political leader takes advantage of the opportunity provided by such interactions to explain his or her thinking and views on issues of public concern.

Even our soft power is not as uncontested as we may like to think. The global marketplace of ideas, fertilized by the Internet, ensures that different countries and cultures illuminate their own paths, affirm their own traditions and provide competing visions of the world to come. Yet, no new grand "-ism" is taking shape and no one country is becoming the new paragon.

Successful public diplomacy requires leadership, imagination, resourcefulness, and determination. The Public Diplomacy Alumni Association (PDAA, formerly USIA Alumni Association) recognizes outstanding achievement by individuals and teams at overseas posts and at State Department headquarters that display these qualities, among others.

Fundamentally, this relationship between the world’s largest and the world’s oldest democracy is very sound. It is not only being carried out on a government-to-government level, but a business level, a cultural level, a professional level, a people-to-people level. So I am very confident that this relationship will only get deeper and broader as time goes by.