Critics close to President Trump recommend dismantling the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). They say that nobody listens to them, that their broadcasts are dominated by leftists, and that they are a relic of the past. After all, Europe is now free and so we don’t need government media.
All these services cost around $1 billion per year. Yes, some of them spout too much leftist content, so perhaps junking them will save us a chunk of change. After all, that’s what it is in today’s federal budget. However, the critics must learn more about these services before rushing to dismantle them.
If reformed, these broadcast services can be one of our most powerful foreign policy instruments—and certainly the most cost-effective. As former adviser to President Reagan on Soviet affairs, I know personally how vital these instruments of foreign policy can be.
If you ask a policy expert to explain what these historical figures were talking about, they won’t provide an intellectually coherent answer. That’s because they don’t study “public diplomacy” and its cousins: political and ideological warfare and psychological strategy. Diplomatic careers are not made by excelling in these fields, and our strategic culture seems incapable of operationalizing Sun Tzu’s counsel that “to defeat your enemy without using force is the acme of skill.”
Broadcasting serves a vital national security function. It supplies truth to audiences who are denied a free press and brainwashed by their government’s propaganda. That propaganda covers up crimes and human rights violations, mobilizes subject peoples with chauvinistic passion, anathematizes foreign enemies, and serves as an informational and psychological pillar of their totalitarian and authoritarian internal security systems.
VOA reports U.S. and world news; however, good journalism is only one element of the broadcaster’s mission. It defends U.S. foreign policy and combats anti-American propaganda by “telling America’s story to the world.” Audiences hear feature programs about aspects of American life that don’t appear in ordinary newspapers. This utilizes a key non-military instrument of statecraft: honest narratives, which combat hostile regimes’ narrative warfare against us.
The “Freedom Radios” have a different mission. They serve as surrogate domestic free presses for nations without a free press. While most countries of Central Europe enjoy press freedom, other audiences such as those in Southeast Europe, Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus, and Russia do not. Neither do the audiences served by Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti, or the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
These services give people their nation’s honest history back, countering the ideological historical revisionism perpetrated by totalitarian regimes to destroy the national memory and remake the national identity. They give religious programming in different faiths to people whose religious freedom is suppressed.
They combat the totalitarian atomization of society, whereby each individual is separated from others by the climate of fear, mistrust, and enforced conformity of thought, speech, and behavior.
Critically, they enable oppressed people to communicate on a mass scale. When our messages reach foreign audiences, atomized dissidents have a greater incentive to organize cells of resistance and develop underground lines of communication to our broadcasters to send messages to their fellow countrymen. The Solidarity strikers did this in Poland, and that mass communication via VOA and RFE enabled millions of Poles to join the Solidarity movement in weeks.
Our broadcasters present democratic ideas, such as the consent of the governed, representative government, the rule of law, and the logic underlying the separation of powers and checks and balances. Totalitarians don’t just fear the truth. They fear democratic ideas and the competing principle of legitimacy. Those ideas are a mortal danger because they exacerbate the internal security threat such regimes face daily from their people. This utilizes a neglected non-military instrument of statecraft: ideological warfare.
Finally, connecting with people—particularly subject-citizens in totalitarian countries—shows them that they are not alone and they have friends with the courage to bear moral witness to the daily violations of their rights and dignity. This is the beginning of another key non-military instrument of power—psychological strategy—which must be used if we are to prevail over the aggressive axis of hostile totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian countries. Encouraging people to shift from a spirit of despair about the prospect of political change to one of hope is an offensive weapon that can mobilize the “people power” it often takes to bring down hostile regimes.
President Reagan understood how strategically decisive these broadcasters were, and how cheap they are. To strengthen reach behind the Iron Curtain, he invested the equivalent of $8.3 billion in today’s dollars.
Does President Trump want to win without war? If so, he should strengthen our ability to help oppressed people throw off their chains.