The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Ideas have consequences and the battle for ideas is important in any age, but especially in our own day, when relativism, secularism and intentional disinformation are rampant in our world.  Thus, in an astonishing and shocking act, President Trump, on 15 March 2025, ordered the termination of grants for Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and Television Marti), the Open Technology Fund and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks are also being dismantled. In February Elon Musk posted on X.com that the U.S. should shut down the networks because “Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Hello??” and “Nobody listens to them anymore.” In his now typical outrageous hyperbole and ringing fabrication, he declared that these media outlets are “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”   But, I would strongly argue that this is a retreat in the global war of ideas and a worthwhile investment in the battle between authoritarianism and democracy now raging in the world of 2025.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a media organization broadcasting news and analyses in 27 languages to 23 countries across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Headquartered in Prague since 1995, RFE/RL operates 21 local bureaus with over 500 core staff, 1,300 freelancers, and 680 employees. Nicola Careem serves as the editor-in-chief.  Founded during the Cold War, RFE began in 1949 targeting Soviet satellite states, while RL, established in 1951, focused on the Soviet Union. Initially funded covertly by the CIA until 1972, the two merged in 1976. RFE/RL was headquartered in Munich from 1949 to 1995, with additional broadcasts from Portugal’s Glória do Ribatejo until 1996. Soviet authorities jammed their signals, and communist regimes often infiltrated their operations.  Today, RFE/RL is a private 501(c)(3) corporation supervised by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees all government-supported international broadcasting. Since the Revolutions of 1989 and the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the organization’s European presence has been reduced.  On 15 March 2025, the United States Agency for Global Media terminated grants to RFE/RL and Radio Free Asia following a directive from the Trump administration.

Li Yuan in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal editorially both provide additional history and the importance of these agencies:

• The news agencies were created to counter communism and spread the truth in countries where media are controlled by governments that lie about the world. As Natan Sharansky and other former prisoners of communism attest, Radio Free Europe was a source of inspiration as it broadcast throughout countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. It’s the same in China, Cuba and other dictatorships today.
• Radio Free Europe/Radio Farda runs Persian language outreach that is heard or seen by 10% of the Iranian population each week, some 6.5 million people, according to RFE. Those broadcasts include informing Iranians about Mr. Trump’s discussions with the Iranian regime.
• The networks operate in countries where a free media is restricted. Radio Farda delivered news during the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and had two billion views across Instagram in 2024. They also bring sunshine in Russia and eastern Ukraine, where few reporters can operate.
• Radio Free Asia (RFA) delivers news and content in Tibetan, Mandarin, Cantonese and to North Korea. Its reporters broke critical stories about Chinese ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang as well as early stories countering the Chinese cover-up of the progress of the Covid epidemic.
• RFA has some 38 million followers on social-media platforms. Following the implementation of Hong Kong’s draconian national-security law, RFA’s Cantonese Instagram account grew rapidly and now has some 150,000 followers. The Open Technology Fund helps locals circumvent internet firewalls—supporting VPNs and other ways for Chinese citizens to evade government censorship. China bans or restricts Western social-media platforms even as Chinese-owned TikTok operates freely in the U.S. and uses algorithms to mute criticism of China.
• The networks of the Agency for Global Media provide original reporting in more than 100 countries in 63 languages, reaching 420 million people. Radio Free Asia has an annual budget of $60.8 million and reaches some 58 million people a week. The cost is inconsequential compared to the value of news that challenges the narratives of autocratic regimes.
• Voice of America reaches more than 361 million people a week around the world on an annual budget of $268 million. Its English channel on YouTube has 3.7 million subscribers. Its Chinese channel has 2.3 million subscribers. Many of its programs’ episodes had millions of views, including an hour-long one by Mr. Xu, the Stanford economist, on China’s economic troubles, which was viewed 5.1 million times. A weekly commentary program by Cai Xia, a retired professor of the Communist Party central school turned critic of the party, garnered hundreds of thousands of views for each episode on YouTube. They and some other regular commentators on VOA and Radio Free Asia are far from radical leftists.
• Radio Free Asia broadcasts in Burmese, Cantonese, English, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur and Vietnamese. It has an annual budget of $60.8 million and reaches 58 million people a week. “The cost is inconsequential compared to the value of news that challenges the narratives of autocratic regimes,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote.

President Trump has adopted Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” theme to echo the Gipper’s successful foreign-policy realism. “But what Mr. Trump ignores is the idealism that was the other half of Reagan’s message: the promotion of human freedom that undermined dictatorships from within.” Trump seems to understand the leverage of hard military power, but he has no interest in soft power or the war of ideas. “It’s a blind spot that will be filled by the propaganda of our adversaries.”

Permit me an illustration of the power of these agencies that Trump has now killed:  “The Czech Republic is a free country today partly thanks to Radio Free Europe, said Peter Honzejk, of the Czech Republic and recently quoted in The Week.  It offered us “an alternative to regime propaganda when we were suffering under totalitarian rule, and in gratitude our dissident-turned president, Vaclav Havel, offered it a home in Prague when communism fell.  Now it and its sister organizations like Radio Liberty and Radio Farda broadcast in local languages to Asia and the Middle East as well as the former Soviet region, “bringing hope to” some 50 million people over the airwaves and the internet.  These broadcasts provide some of the only truthful reporting some oppressed people can access.  It is quite shameful that the US, once a beacon of freedom and hope to oppressed people, has closed down one of the most effective channels to counter authoritarian despotism and autocracy.  It is difficult to see this as advancement in the promotion of freedom and liberty in this fallen, broken world.  It is a sad day for America!

See Wikipedia entry on Radio Free Europe;  Wall Street Journal editorial (20 March 2025); Li Yuan in the New York Times (30 March 2025); and The Week (4 April 2025).