On February 28, we celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Shanghai Communique. The 1972 agreement, brokered by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, ended 23 years of diplomatic estrangement between the United States and China, and laid the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous Asia. The Vietnam War was still raging when the Communique was signed but there has been no major war in the Asia-Pacific since that time. 

US spending on overseas aid is expected to bear the brunt of dramatic cuts as part of Trump’s plan to increase defence spending by $54bn in his upcoming budget. The US operates the largest and most expensive overseas aid programme in the world, with a proposed federal spend of $50.1bn for 2017 alone. More than $18bn of that is made up of economic and development assistance, commonly referred to as humanitarian aid. 

A major 2013 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences warned that at “the very moment when China and some European nations are seeking to replicate our model of broad education,” including the humanities, the U.S. was instead “narrowing” its focus and abandoning its “sense of what education has been and should continue to be.” The paper caught the attention of policy makers, including members of Congress. 

Bad guys can possess soft power. I know—I wrote a book about it. But over most of the past century the U.S., as the soft power hyperpuissance, has largely set the standards of what constitutes effective national image projection. The United States has drawn its soft power, the “ability to shape the preferences of others,” as put by Joseph S. Nye, who devised the term. 

U.S. representative Raúl Grijalva said climate change is the greatest danger facing the world right now in his closing speech at the Science Diplomacy and Policy with Focus on the Americas conference in Tucson. Applause erupted from the conference attendees, speakers, panelists and organizers in the audience. [...] The conference aimed to provide a “state of the art” vision for the future in science diplomacy and policy. 

Russia has been making the headlines of international media for a while now. But none of that had to do with a strong economy or a powerful army because Russia simply doesn't have either. Instead, it has learned to interfere through other means in the politics, media, elections and national security of other countries. [...] The new methods of Russian influence are well-known, but it seems that Western countries have turned out to be unprepared for them.