Through activities such as institutional partnerships, scholarships, mobility and, most recently, offshore campuses and satellite offices, universities and their nations of origin have furthered their relationship with key-countries. This paper aims to understand what factors universities considered when choosing the host country of their satellite offices and possible interest in diplomacy. The exercise focused on the efforts of US universities in Brazil. It tested expressions of soft power versus internal elements of universities' administration to verify their significance. By checking the efforts of 131 US universities, this paper hints that non-academic elements, such as a country's foreign policy, were also statistically significant and must be taken into account when analysing universities' internationalisation strategies.