Diplomacy

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates renewed his call Tuesday for more spending on U.S. diplomacy and international aid, saying the U.S. government risks "creeping militarization" of its foreign policy by focusing its resources on the Pentagon. With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in attendance, Gates said in a speech that the government's civilian institutions, especially those with the tasks of diplomacy and development, had been undermanned and underfunded since the end of the Cold War. Gates has made the argument before, most notably in November in an address at Kansas State University.

BEIJING - Chinese President Xi Jinping nibbled on empanadas at the home of a Costa Rican coffee farmer. His wife played the steel drums in Trinidad and Tobago. With smiles and, of course, money, China is on an unusual charm offensive to win the love it thinks should accompany the country's economic rise. The trip that will culminate with a summit in Rancho Mirage with President Obama is part of a concerted effort by the new Chinese government to enhance its world power status. "The Chinese are well aware that they have an image problem abroad so they've taken this diplomatic offense to enhance their 'soft' power," said Mario Esteban, an expert in China's activities in Latin America at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

One is a chubby amateur singer with a bowl haircut, the other a vegetable seller with a big heart. Together, they may have done more to put Taiwan in an international spotlight than years of checkbook diplomacy by the previous government. The singer Lin Yu-chun became an instant celebrity after a clip of him singing in perfect pitch the Whitney Houston hit "I Will Always Love You" in a local talent show went viral on YouTube, with millions of views and counting. The vegetable vendor, Chen Shu-chu, appeared on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the year, for years of generous donations to charity despite her humble earnings.

"The Island President" (PBS, Monday, 10 p.m.). Comprising 2,000 pancake-flat islands in the Indian Ocean, with a mean elevation of about five feet above sea level, the Maldives will be the first nation to go, literally, when the oceans rise. Jon Shenk's documentary follows then-president Mohamed Nasheed on a mission to save his country, his people and maybe the world. A frequently jailed activist who once spent 18 months in solitary confinement in a corrugated iron shed, Nasheed hits the road to make his quixotic case for environmental responsibility.

In today's world, America's soft power is commonly thought to reside in the global popularity of Hollywood movies, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Starbucks. But the facts tell a different story. In a recent poll involving 43 countries, 79% of respondents said that what they most admire about the United States is its leadership in science and technology. The artifacts of the American entertainment industry came in a distant second. In the 1970s, what I, as a young foreign student studying in the United States, found most dynamic, exciting and impressive about this country is what much of the world continues to value most about the U.S. today: its open intellectual culture, its great universities, its capacity for discovery and innovation.

You picked the wrong biologist to talk to. "In Its Sights" (Jan. 13), with its "experts," sounds like the official denial and political pandering that set people up to be killed in Boulder, Colo. The key to good lion-human relations is mutual fear and respect. Lions who do not fear humans, who eat pets with impunity, associate humans with food. Lions need to be harassed, by hunting or other means, so that they fear man as predator. Mike Post Winnetka

Stung by allegations that it uses money to win diplomatic backing, Taiwan said Saturday that it will no longer employ its wealth to fight China's diplomatic blockade. The announcement by Foreign Minister John Chang followed allegations that the Taiwanese governing party's top money man offered to contribute $15 million to President Clinton's reelection campaign at a time when Taiwan was raising its diplomatic profile over furious objections from rival China.

After a serious discussion of relations between United States and Mexico, John Gavin, former, ambassador to Mexico, gave Chapman College supporters a lesson in diplomacy Friday night. "Henry Kissinger told me diplomacy is nothing more than common sense," Gavin told 100 guests at the Newport Beach home of Judie and George Argyros. "The difference between stupidity and diplomacy?"

The Obama administration has already concluded that a diplomatic overture to Iran, one of the central promises of the president's election campaign, is unlikely to persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear ambitions. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates in a private meeting Monday that it is "very doubtful" a U.S.

Europe: Anti-war protesters marched in cities across the Continent, including Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Milan, Madrid and Barcelona. At European airports from London to Rome, added police and security guards checked passengers. Israel: President Chaim Herzog addressed his apprehensive nation. Israel's air force commander said his interceptors were flying around the clock against the possibility of attack.

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State John F. Kerry implored Congress on Thursday not to impose tough new sanctions on Iran, warning that such a move could disrupt diplomacy over Tehran's disputed nuclear program at a delicate moment. Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry said that because Iran is two months away from an election, new U.S. economic penalties could become an inflamed political issue and reduce the chances of a deal to curb the nuclear program. "There's an enormous amount of jockeying going on, with the obvious normal tension between hard-liners and people who want to make an agreement," he told committee Chairman Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)

Gov. Jerry Brown's trade mission to China this week is intersecting with one of the most controversial issues of his governorship: California's $68-billion bullet train. The governor has staked part of his legacy on the rail network, a centerpiece of his vision for California. He is hoping that China, which is enjoying an economic boom and spent $77.6 billion on overseas investments last year, according to official figures, will pump some of its cash into the troubled project. Joins us at 9 a.m. as we discuss Brown's trip with Times reporter Anthony York.

Unearthing the mystery of Pablo Neruda's death Monday, April 8 : Did famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda die of cancer or was he poisoned? The remains of the Nobel Prize laureate will be exhumed Monday from his Isla Negra grave on the Chilean coast as authorities probe allegations that he was murdered in the wake of the 1973 military coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. The cause of death was listed at the time as advanced prostate cancer. But Neruda's chauffeur and bodyguard, Manuel Araya Osorio, came forward two years ago with a report that the 69-year-old leftist had appeared well on the morning of his death and, after suddenly becoming feverish, told of being given an injection by a doctor the previous night.

President Obama's recent Middle East trip showed what good things can result from thoughtful, direct presidential involvement. The president addressed young Israelis, reassured allies in the region and brokered an Israeli apology to Turkey for a deadly raid on a flotilla attempting to take supplies to Gaza. The president should employ that same sort of diplomacy toward North Korea. An increasingly dangerous confrontation is building between the United States and North Korea. The outrageous rhetoric pouring out of Pyongyang makes it difficult to do anything more than dismiss North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un. But abandoning diplomacy would be extremely dangerous.

It's a story so strange it could have been cobbled together through Mad Libs: Flamboyant basketball star Dennis Rodman and some of the showy Harlem Globetrotters arrived Tuesday in the isolated country of North Korea, in a filmed trip billed as “basketball diplomacy.” Bringing the pierced and provocative Rodman into regimented North Korea is aimed at “finding common ground on the basketball court,” said Shane Smith, the founder of a...

It might have been a chance meeting or a cunning act of propaganda, but the encounter more than 40 years ago between two pingpong champions - one Chinese, the other American - launched what President Nixon would call "the week that changed the world. " Zhuang Zedong, the captain of the Chinese team competing at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Japan, was at the back of his team's bus when its doors swung open for a straggler, American juniors champion Glenn Cowan. With the United States and China still stuck in the Cold War, none of the Chinese players dared utter a word to the American.

An updated chronology of war and peace in the South Atlantic: 1982: Argentina and Britain go to war over the Falkland Islands, a British colony that Argentines call the Malvinas. Britain wins. 1989: After seven years without direct diplomatic or commercial relations, the countries embark on a new path of rapprochement. 1991: Relations continue to improve. But possible petroleum exploration and a ban on commerce between Argentina and the islands loom as divisive issues.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati will go to the Soviet Union on Friday--two days before his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz--for talks on the war with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

WASHINGTON - Sen. John F. Kerry pledged Thursday that as secretary of State he would de-emphasize the military role "thrust upon us" by Sept. 11, saying "we cannot afford a diplomacy that is defined by troops or drones or confrontation. " Appearing at his confirmation hearing before longtime colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Massachusetts Democrat said it was time to spotlight America's international efforts to promote human rights, fight disease and lift the world's poor.

Could "vaccine diplomacy" work on the Korean peninsula? The short answer is yes. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in a New Year's Day speech, called for reductions in international tension and an end to confrontation with South Korea, while raising the prospect of reunification between the North and South. Ultimately, science diplomacy could play an essential role in helping catalyze improved North-South relations in 2013, with joint programs for elimination of neglected diseases as a cornerstone.