What’s the relationship between the West and Africa? A respected – but tiny – Toronto theatre company joins global partners to ask a question as big as a continent.

Among the slew of strategy documents from the Obama administration this spring, full of academic analysis and verbal flourishes, Congress has rightly detected a certain lack of substance. Case in point: The question of whether the U.S. government needs a Center for Strategic Communications and Public Diplomacy.

The problem we face today is one of imbalance. The Defense Department has an annual budget in the range of $750 billion. Compare that with all diplomatic, civilian efforts — which ring in at $50 billion... There are three obvious roles for diplomatic efforts: before, during and after conflicts.

Among the precious few beneficiaries of BP’s mother-of-all-oil spills (outside those who shorted the company's stock) may be diplomacy with Cuba. Or more precisely: oil diplomacy.

One of the main underlying tensions at the OAS meeting will be the question of whether to allow Honduras back into the organization, after it was ousted following that usurped then-President Manuel Zelaya.

Over the past year, the Obama administration has been reaching out and listening to Muslim communities around the world, focusing on a “new beginning” based on mutual interest and respect that President Obama called for in his June 4, 2009, speech at Cairo University in Egypt.

This week, a delegation from India's government arrived in Washington for the first-ever strategic dialogue between India and the United States. This was no routine meeting. It was the culmination of years of intensive engagement between our countries engagement that will grow even deeper as we confront the urgent global, regional and local challenges of this era.

Soft power was a prix fixe menu: If you like our movies and music, then you’ll love our Bill of Rights and elections. Knockoff power is à la carte: Millions of people in modernizing societies wear the veneer of an Americanized way today but beneath it are going deeper into their own culture and becoming more fully themselves — prouder, more confident, less eager to follow a far-off superpower’s lead.