...Celebration of US-China Friendship...in Atlanta, Georgia. The show, co-sponsored by the Chinese Consulate General in Houston and the city of Atlanta, "is a wonderful example of the cultural and people-to-people exchanges necessary to build closer ties between the Chinese and American people," Carter said.

"Masauko is coming to Malawi with support from the US government's 'Arts Envoy' program me. "The programme shares the best of the American arts community with the world to foster people-to-people connections, cross-cultural understanding and collaboration, and to demonstrate shared values and aspirations," Canavan explained.

The centre’s work to show Russia as it is in real life will bring forward an era of unfettered humanitarian cooperation between my country and the United States. This work will be promoting public diplomacy, in which ordinary people on the two sides build Russian-American ties. There will be exchanges and Russian language courses for beginners and teachers.

Thus, one should not be very optimistic about the US ability to create effective linkages with the nascent civilian governments of the region, not even Turkey's. It is “INT'L 101” level knowledge that the main US weakness is public diplomacy.

In an era of declining military spending, when the Western world moves away from expensive boots on the ground and surgical strikes, and towards working with domestic political movements and UN-led peace-keeping missions, the less-costly “soft power” first championed by Mackay, which measures success not in body bags but in friends won and peaces kept, is the new military zeitgeist.

Moving forward, we need a far more neutral baseline in assessing power based not on a latent accounting of inputs such as nuclear stockpiles and Hollywood films produced, but on outputs: does it work?...As a student of diplomatic theory, the greatest myth elevated by the notion of ‘soft power’ is its self-identification with diplomacy and their collective antithetical role to ‘hard’ or military power.

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a group that says it is working to prevent Iran from "fulfilling its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons"...It has now called on Jennifer Lopez to end her partnership with the car manufacturer Fiat, if the company refuses to terminate its business with Iran.

Frank Villani, manager of the cultural affairs department of San Antonio, Texas, received the title for his continued efforts in facilitating cultural exchanges between Taiwan and the U.S. over the past five years, the CCA said.