We aren’t doing too much in public diplomacy. We do have regular attendance at such expos, a military band that travels, a festival of arts held in the South Pacific, and shows like Pacific Night in Washington, DC and elsewhere . However, I don’t know if there’s a systematic plan to exploit this area on the world stage.

Whatever became of President Barack Obama’s vaunted foreign policy czars, who were to transform America’s international relations through soft power diplomacy? The answer is nothing good. One by one the czars have fallen by the wayside, leaving a trail of bureaucratic irritation and diplomatic failure behind them.

China has cultivated a delicate foreign policy toward the Southeast Asian region over the years. It initially followed soft-power diplomacy...This "feel-good factor" paid dividends as it helped China to sign a code of conduct on the dispute of the South China Sea with the contending parties.

For much of the past decade, “soft power” has been touted as a means for making foreign policy more effective by emphasizing enticement rather than coercion, conversation rather than conflict. The concept has won applause, but putting it into practice has often been half-hearted...In an era in which revolutions rely more on social media than on machine guns, soft power will be ascendant.

The editorial seems reflective of a trend...Chinese policymakers, academic strategists, and journalists are stil a lot more obsessed with the United States than the other way around. Yes, there's been some perfunctory rhetoric about "getting tough with China" on the campaign trail, but there's still far more ink spilled over the Middle East in the U.S. national political conversation.

Given rapid economic development of Asian countries and the gradual formation of a new type of cooperation pattern, the United States is afraid to miss the express train of Asia's development and lose its dominance of regional affairs. The U.S. move to "return to Asia" aims to gain more interests from Asia's regional development and cement its dominant position.

President Obama’s conception of soft power has curiously lacked the very quality that has made it most efficacious in the past—the values dimension. His governance has virtually ignored the values dimension of soft power, which goes beyond the tradecraft of diplomacy and multilateral consultation to aggressively assert the ideals of freedom in practical initiatives.

Hallyu or the Korean Wave, which refers to the fast-growing popularity of Korean entertainment and culture through TV dramas, movies, pop music and food around the world, particularly in Japan, China and Southeast Asia, could be a valuable soft-power asset to improve better understanding of Korea and its national brand value.