'Three cups of tea' has entered the U.S. troop lexicon as shorthand for a trust-building chat with locals. It is drawn from the bestseller by Greg Mortenson, who sets up girls schools in the region.

While voices in China continue to be raised against American naval exercises near the China coast and asserting Beijing's increased influence in global affairs, other voices are now being heard questioning the wisdom of China's increasing assertiveness.

The Obama administration is focused not just on health-care reform in the United States – but also on improving health care systems around the world, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced on Monday.

The controversy over a mosque close to the World Trade Center site in New York City has swept through the country like a summer storm...It is a controversy that can do irreparable harm to United States foreign policy and its struggle against Islamic extremism. For it punctures the image the United States was trying so hard to project: that America is a place where Muslims can freely worship and co-exist with other religions in peace and harmony; that Islam can coexist with modernity and tolerance

The Obama administration is planning to expand opportunities for Americans to travel to Cuba, the latest step aimed at encouraging more contact between people in both countries, while leaving intact the decades-old embargo against the island’s Communist government, according to Congressional and administration officials.

On March 30, 1949, in its first semi-annual report by the US Advisory Commission on Information, the predecessor to today's Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, recommended an "immediate and broad expansion of the world-wide information program being conducted by the State Department, including the activities of the Voice of America."

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan E. Rice and her staff moved this morning into the new U.S. mission to the United Nations, a 26-story solid concrete tower that is designed to protect America's diplomats from a suicide car bomb or chemical or biological weapon attack. Its completion is two years behind schedule.

Sometimes effective public diplomacy can be conducted through a simple and unambiguous gesture. Such was the case when President Barack Obama recently commemorated the 50th anniversaries of 17 African nations’ independence at the White House. The gesture – or really a non-gesture – was to not invite a single African head of state to the event.