Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power
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The argument for international aid is in part a moral one, but it has also always been about U.S. interests. Here's then-Senator Marco Rubio making that argument back in 2017. I promise you it's going to be a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism, anti-American terrorism.

If the United States of America was the reason why they're even alive today. Today, as Secretary of State, Rubio sounds more like his boss. President Trump calls the United States Agency for International Development a left-wing scam. Here's how he described it in his speech to CPAC last month.

We're giving billions and billions of dollars to countries that hate us. The administration shuttered USAID, which a federal judge said this week may have violated the Constitution. What's left of USAID has been folded into the State Department. And Rubio announced last week that 83 percent of its contracts had been cut. He said they did not serve and in some cases even harmed the core national interests of the United States.

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It's part of a broader turn away from traditional sources of U.S. soft power and toward new ones, like tariffs on allies. Tariffs are also a powerful tool of diplomacy and all around the world are moving quickly to bring back peace through strength. Trump has also effectively shut down the Voice of America, the editorially independent, government-funded broadcaster that brought the news to 360 million people around the world in nearly 50 languages.

taxpayer-funded radical propaganda, says the White House. Trump also terminated government funding for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. It was launched in the Cold War to bring news to people living behind the Iron Curtain without access to a free press. It still serves listeners living under authoritarian governments. President and CEO Steve Kappas said the spending cut is a, quote,

to America's enemies. We're a lifeline to the people who live in those countries, and they have no access to information outside of largely government propaganda and other types of information like that. So we're leaving the information battlefield, if you will, to these countries like Iran, like China. He is suing to get the funding restored. ♪

Consider this. Soft power has been a pillar of American foreign policy. Is the Trump administration giving up on it? From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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It's Consider This from NPR. The United States Institute of Peace is very explicitly about U.S. soft power. Its website proclaims it is dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad.

It's a congressionally funded think tank here in Washington, and Trump is trying to shut it down. He fired most of its board and its acting president and CEO, George Moose, for failing to comply with an executive order that effectively eliminates the institute.

That led to a dramatic scene this week. Moose says he was holed up in his office after members of Elon Musk's Doge team broke into the building. D.C. police eventually helped escort Moose out, which is where our colleague Michelle Kellerman caught up with him. Standing outside on the steps of the Institute he had run until just a few days before, George Moose told Michelle it was a sad day for the U.S. Institute of Peace. This building really was bad.

built not just as a platform for the work that we do. It was built as a symbol of the aspiration of the American people to be peace builders in the world. That's why it is as beautiful as it is. And I have to believe that in the long term, that purpose, that mission will be reaffirmed and that we will

and one way or another be allowed to continue it. I wanted to talk through that mission with someone who sponsored the legislation that created the USIP. So I spoke with former Democratic congressman from Kansas, also former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman.

Secretary Glickman, welcome. Thank you, Mary Louise. A pleasure to be with you. What went through your mind this week as you watched a hostile takeover of the USIP? Well, I think the actions of the Doge Group of the administration were unconscionable in my view. I was very involved in the creation of this organization, not the only sponsor, but the lead house sponsor back in the late 1970s, early 1980s.

And in my case, I came from central Kansas, where there were a large number of Mennonites who wanted to see the United States establish a peace academy, kind of like a military academy. So we worked on that for years and years. And ultimately, it was decided that instead of an academy, an institute that would try to promote conflict resolution techniques,

try to deal with extremism in the world, and try to do our best to assert American power responsibly, along with other soft power aspects of the American government, including USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation and other things. And so it works. I thought it's worked very well.

I mean, at the risk of oversimplifying, because obviously a lot of things go into what prevents or enables a conflict, but is there a specific example you would point us to where the USIP played a role in helping to avert a conflict? I think in South Asia, in the Middle East,

Certainly in the entire continent of Africa, there have been all sorts of ways where we have tried to improve the governance systems of the countries to make it so that their systems are much more stable. USIP will contract with various organizations, including the U.S. military, to try to deal with these problems as they occur.

So, to the Trump administration's stated concern, take that head on. Why should Congress fund a think tank? I mean, what's the need in a town where there is no shortage of think tanks, plenty of which get by on private funding? Well...

Well, I know think tanks that do a very good job, but this is kind of unique. Imagine, you know, we have this big building in downtown Washington near the State Department. It says U.S. Institute of Peace, and its goal is to promote peace and conflict resolution around the world. It works with the State Department, but it's a wonderful thing that the United States not only has this great military establishment, the Defense Department does a

spectacular job, but also has an entity that deals with the causes of conflict, not just the results of conflict. If I'm hearing you right, your argument boils down to the U.S. should fund this using taxpayer money because it directly benefits the United States?

It directly benefits the United States. It establishes our influence as engaged in the world. We work with other governments in this regard. It doesn't have the restrictions that a lot of bureaucracies have in the State Department and the Defense Department, but it does work with them as well. And in the big scheme of things, when we're talking about spending close to a trillion dollars a year on our military, there's a lot of money that's being spent on the military.

that we're spending, you know, a tiny, tiny percentage of that funding to try to deal in advance with the causes of conflict, the causes of extremism, and trying to prevent those bad things from happening, which ultimately may lead us into war. So, Secretary Glickman, if the US IP is scaled back, if it outright disappears, what might be the impact?

Well, first of all, I hope it's not disappearing. There is no entity of government that should escape scrutiny. So I want to make that clear. And I think the USIP probably shouldn't escape scrutiny either. But if it's gone, then we lose the opportunity to make the case for conflict resolution and peaceful ways to resolve these conflicts before war occurs, before death occurs.

And, you know, you're not always successful, but in many cases you move the ball forward. And it's the United States of America that's moving the ball forward. So you take this USIP, you add all the stuff that the Agency for International Development does, you add all the stuff that the Voice of America does to try to project America's influence around the world. This is part of our soft power.

We need hard power, too. We desperately need our government to have an adequate military. But we also need soft power. And by the way, this was created in a very bipartisan atmosphere. I remember how it was created. It was added to the defense authorization bill. And so—

It's one of the few things that we've had bipartisanship on in this area. It is indeed true that both Republican and Democratic lawmakers pushed to create this institute. It prompts a bigger question, though, which is can the U.S. Institute of Peace, can any institution truly be nonpartisan in such a hyperpartisan moment?

Well, that's a problem we all have right now. I mean, how does the Congress work in this moment that we're dealing with? And, you know, back in the historic period when I was in the Congress, it was more bipartisan than it is now. And I wish that we had a lot of that same environment that we did back then. But yes, it can do some good. I don't think it does any harm at all. It can do some good. We have potential conflicts around the world. And, you know, this is an area where we have a lot of competitors.

So if we're not involved in this, it either doesn't happen or countries like China and North Korea and Iran and Russia are involved. China's influence around the world in the soft power area has grown rather significantly in the last several years. And so in my judgment, it deserves scrutiny like every other agency. But let's do it the right way.

That's former Democratic Congressman Dan Glickman. He was the principal House sponsor of legislation which led to the creation of the U.S. Institute of Peace back in 1984. Dan Glickman, thank you. Thank you for having me.

As we mentioned, the Trump administration is also gutting the Voice of America. This U.S.-funded broadcaster reached audiences in countries the U.S. government deemed autocratic without free media. That includes China. And Piers Emily Fang has this story about Voice of America's legacy there. Growing up in China in the 1970s, listener Anna Wong remembers how fellow students would secretly tune into Voice of America's shortwave broadcasts.

She says listening to VOA was illegal, punishable in some cases by the death penalty. So Wang says later on, even as China relaxed politically, fellow university students surreptitiously listened to VOA under thick blankets in their dorms at midnight. The news may be good or bad.

We shall tell you the truth. VUA was seen as so subversive, it was nicknamed the D-Tai, or enemy channel in China. It served as a kind of underground transmission for both news and for sharing sounds of resistance, including this song.

A song about homesickness and hometowns, beloved by students who were forcibly exiled to the Chinese countryside starting in the 1950s. VOA broadcast the song, boosting its popularity even when the song was officially banned.

And as China entered the political foment of the 1980s, VOA's unvarnished reports in English and Mandarin became even more influential. It was a source of truth when things are changing rapidly. This is Zhou Fengsuo, who became a student leader in mass democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

his student union at Beijing's Tsinghua University started broadcasting VOA from its speakers. That's the way...

Because state media refused to cover the protests. When Beijing sent in tanks to quell the student demonstrators, these VOA reports on the fatal crackdown in Tiananmen Square were broadcast globally.

VOA's focus on highlighting dissent meant it was popular among Republican politicians in the U.S., but invariably despised by authoritarian governments abroad. And with its potential closure after Trump ordered the agency that funds it to be dismantled, China's ruling Communist Party must be the happiest people in the world right now, says Wu Xiaoping, a Chinese human rights lawyer.

By the 1990s, listening to VOA had become less sensitive in China, and more and more Chinese people tuned in to learn English. Lucy Hornby, a longtime China-focused journalist, was teaching in China at the time, and one student of hers in particular loved VOA. His English name was Sidney, and he would come to my door and he would say, this is Voice of America.

And that's how I knew he was there. Now VOA has come under criticism by Trump allies for being too expensive, and they say sympathetic to American adversaries. Hornby says the broadcaster positively shaped perceptions of the U.S. abroad. They had a generally positive impression, not because they were getting all good news, actually. I think they respected that they were getting...

what felt like real news. The impact went both ways. VOA trained generations of Chinese-speaking journalists. They covered on-the-ground news in China to a degree of detail unmatched by other Western outlets. Many who listened saw VOA as a window for people in China to understand the world and for the world to know what was going on in China. That was NPR's Emily Feng.

This episode was produced by Erica Ryan, Gurjeet Kaur, and Connor Donovan. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata. Our executive producer is Sammy Yinnigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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