American intelligence analysts, like most U.S. observers, have often referred to the process unfolding in the Middle East as the “Arab Spring,” with its implicit message of democratic birth and freedom.

US vice president Joe Biden isn’t having an easy time... with the public diplomacy involved in this week’s visit to Beijing. First, his opening remarks at a key meeting with Xi Jinping...were interrupted by a kerfuffle involving Chinese officials and journalists covering the trip.

Four hundred foreign students complained to the State Department that the Hershey chocolate company abused a foreign-exchange program to put them to work packing chocolate and stashed them in overpriced company housing that leaves them only $40 to $140 for a week's work.

The move has been closely coordinated with European, Turkish and Arab allies and would come one day after al-Assad told the head of the United Nations that military and police operations against anti-government protesters have stopped...

The incidental influence that the United States exerts simply through people around the world observing its behavior is consistently underestimated, just as the influence the United States can exert intentionally by exercising its economic, military, or other instruments of hard power tends to be overestimated.

Why are Muslims so stubborn in nurturing ancient beliefs and rituals when they fly in the face of modern capitalist society? Secular critics dismiss Islam as a harmful, even dangerous anachronism. Why disrupt one’s busy day five times to pray...

The policies Clinton is defending (at least publicly; I bet privately she’s not so happy with the administration’s direction) could more accurately be described as the “lead from behind” doctrine rather than “smart power.”

...despite Turkey’s understanding that Assad must go, the country is unwilling to intervene militarily or use its soft power in regards to trade and the economy to pressure the Syrian regime.