Lawfare Daily: Tom Kent on the Dismantling of American Government Broadcasting

[Intro]

Benjamin Wittes: Just a quick editorial note that this was recorded before the Financial Times reported on Friday that the Czech Republic was announcing that it would step in to provide emergency support to Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. This does not affect the conversation insofar as it applies to the Voice of America, but it does look like that at least the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty side may be in a different place than it was last week.

Tom Kent: Why would you not want to have a way to communicate directly to these people? If you don't, what are they gonna listen to? You know, they're obviously gonna be listening to Chinese, Russian, and, and lord knows what else anti-American content. And then when, you know, U.S. mining engineers are trying to operate in Congo, you're gonna reap the whirlwind of these people being in a super anti-American mood.

Benjamin Wittes: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare, with Tom Kent, former head of Radio Free Europe.

Tom Kent: If the U.S. government comes up with some alternative way to address the world's people in a way that is credible and not just a blast of propaganda that, that, that turns listeners off, then, you know, I suppose there's, there's some future to the whole concept of international communication.

Benjamin Wittes: Today we're talking about the administration's executive order dismantling USAGM, the parent company of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and a bunch of other U.S. information broadcasters.

[Main podcast]

Alright, so let's start with your history with Voice of America and its related organizations. How did you come to be involved in it and what was your role?

Tom Kent: I had a long history in Russian affairs. That was my specialty at university. And then I joined the Associated Press and worked in a number of overseas assignments, including as Moscow bureau chief. Then I came back from Moscow to become head of international news at AP and ethics editor of the AP, and remained sort of the AP’s Russianist, going back to, to Russia constantly through the, through the end of the Soviet Union, the, the Gorbachev period, and a little, little bit into the Yeltsin period.

And when I left the Associated Press in 2016, I became president and CEO of Radio for Europe/Radio Liberty, which focuses heavily on the former Soviet Union countries, although it's coverage area includes Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, East Europe. And I was there until, about the middle of 2018.

And after that, I, I came back to the U.S. I teach now at Columbia University about the world information war. I write books about it and I consult to governments, militaries, NGOs on Russian affairs and questions of propaganda and disinformation.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so for those who do not understand the borderlines between all of these, these organizations—Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí in Cuba, Sawa. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different U.S. government backed, or at least there were until last weekend, government backed news slash counter propaganda organizations, and they are all, I think, under the auspices of an organization called USAGM.

So explain to us a little bit about what these different organizations are and why they're separate and why they are historically grouped under this, this umbrella organization.

Tom Kent: Well, there's been all sorts of adjusting and readjusting and resorting in these organizations over time. But at the moment, they are indeed all under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is USAGM, and they're all a little bit different in different ways.

The Voice of America and Radio Martí—which is the branch of USAGM that broadcasts to Cuba—are government agencies so their employees are civil servants. They have all civil service protection. They are government employees.

Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Middle East broadcasting networks are what they call grantees. They receive a grant from the government to operate. They're organized as private companies. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, for example—which is two organizations that were welded into one so it has that kind of awkward name now—is a a private corporation based in Delaware. And receives a grant from the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Comes originally through Congress, and Congress designates a certain amount of money that it gives USAGM for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. And that's how we get our funding.

Benjamin Wittes: At the highest level of altitude, what happened last week, last weekend with respect to this? I mean the, if you read the executive order, what it says is USAGM shall be reduced to the statutory minimum required of it. So what did that mean for Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America? I mean, how shut down are they at this point?

Tom Kent: Well, ultimately the courts are gonna decide. It depends how much money each of the, each of the grantee organizations—Radio Free Europe, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia—have in their, in their cash drawer, left. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is still operating a good deal. We have a little bit of cash, but we're talking about a month or two.

And the, the courts will decide what exactly statutory requirements means. To me, it would seem that if Congress appropriates money for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, then there's a statutory requirement for the U.S. Agency for Global Media to disperse that money. But you know, it's terribly complicated, all of it legally, and we'll see.

Benjamin Wittes: But just to be clear, for the side of it that is actually U.S. government agencies, which is to say Voice of America and Radio Marti, they just fired everybody, right?

Tom Kent: Well, they put them on administrative leave. I think there's some people who are still there and sometimes one can see a little flicker of action on the website or, or some transmitter still on the air, but it's, it's obviously been, been kneecapped tremendously.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. And you know, they were put on administrative leave initially, but then a whole bunch of them got termination notices as to their contracts. And I think that's—obviously it'll be a matter of litigation whether those are valid, but I think we have to assume that there's a certain, you know, a measure of finality. If the government really doesn't wanna run a news organization, it's pretty hard to force it to,

Tom Kent: Right. And you lose all these people who, obviously, I think a lot of them already had their resumes out because of all the hostile things that were said about U.S. international broadcasting before, before this last action. So you're gonna lose people with a lot of language and other expertise who will just go elsewhere, even if the government eventually decides it wants to rehire them.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so let's talk about these organizations and their actual role in the media ecosystem. So, for most Americans, these organizations are completely invisible because they don't actually serve an American audience. That's not what they're for.

Let's talk first about their historic importance, because that seems to be completely uncontroversial. What was their role prior to the fall of the Soviet Union? And then we'll talk about the more contemporary role in a moment. But talk to us about where these organizations came from and, and what was the historic role that they served.

Tom Kent: They're created at different times. The first one was the Voice of America, which was created during World War II broadcasting first in German to Germany. And then after the war we had Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the others followed after that.

During the Cold War Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was extremely active and effective in penetrating the Communist bloc. It was about the only way that people in, in Soviet-occupied east Europe and in in, in the Soviet Union itself could get outside information.

Benjamin Wittes: Let me cut you off there for a second. How do we know it was effective? I mean, it's, it's easy for us to sit here and say, hey, Voice of America played a really important role and Radio Free Europe played a really important, important role during the Cold War, but what's the actual evidence that it did?

Tom Kent: Well, I think what you have to do is look in the mirror and look at the Soviet reaction to what these broadcasters were doing. It was little short of hysterical. Every day or two in, in Pravda there would be some cartoon denouncing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. And the same thing happened in in other countries that, that these broadcasters targeted. They were very much hated by the government, which obviously felt a need to attack them, and you know, I would trust the Soviet government to know that its people were listening and that it was worth making such a big deal out of it. Otherwise they would've ignored it.

There were Russians who were going out to their dutches on weekends covering their radios with aluminum foil, twisting them in all directions to, to try to find some way to, to hear our broadcast through, through the Soviet jamming. The Soviets, we estimated, spent a lot more on jamming our broadcasts than we spent on creating them. So obviously they saw it as a, as a mortal threat.

Benjamin Wittes: There were important events in Soviet history that people principally learned about from these services. I'm thinking about Chernobyl, all kinds of stuff related to Czechoslovakia in, in the late 60s, and if you hear like Lindsey Graham talk about this executive order, he'll say, yeah, it played an important role in the Cold War, but, you know, not, I don't know what it's been up to since the end of the since the Berlin Wall came down.

My impression is that there are still a lot of people who get their news from Voice of America, from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, etc. What is the current function as you understand it?

Tom Kent: Currently, it's what it was before. It broadcasts news for people who can't get, I. It's legitimate news through, through other channels. So we see USAGM networks completely active in all these places.

The big difference is that a lot of people still think that we basically do radio and there is still some radio, 'cause in some parts of the world that's a way to get through. But the USAGM networks are very active in web social networks, satellite broadcasting television. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has a 24 hour Russian language TV news channel. So they use all the, all the latest technology, including an awful lot of technology to break through blockages, which the Russians and others now try to put on our web services.

Benjamin Wittes: Right. So let's talk about that, 'cause it seems to me that this is—and I kind of mockingly argued this in a column—that if you're trying to build a foreign policy based on lies, it's actually not an obvious thing that you should want to have a first rate set of newsrooms that operate in multiple different languages—I mean, VOA alone is 49 or 50 languages or something—that actually gives people high quality information. That this, that this is at some level a pretty logical follow on to a policy that adopts a lot of Russian disinformation as true.

And when I wrote that, I was trying to be provocative, but I actually think it's right. That if you're, you know, if you're spouting Russian propaganda from the Oval Office in meetings with the Ukrainian president, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to also employ, you know, a hundred Russian speaking journalists and forty Ukrainian speaking journalists whose job is gonna be to correct you.

And so I, I'm curious, you know—your sadness and anger over the destruction of these organizations aside—are you surprised by it?

Tom Kent: The administration and voices close to it have had a lot of problems with U.S. international broadcasting for forever. In the first Trump term, there was a Trump appointed leader of USAGM by the name of Michael Pack, who set out to reform it as he put it. And a lot of people felt that his, his goal was essentially to get into the editorial function and, and make it go in a certain way.

But, you know, whoever's in the Oval Office, it seems to me, should see some value in U.S. international broadcasting for one purpose or another. For example, we at the moment, or the past few days, have been bombing Yemen. Well, for the people in Yemen, you would think that you would wanna have some way to communicate to them why the U.S. is bombing their country, to explain that it's because of the Houthis who are firing missiles at ships, and that maybe if they could get the Houthis not to fire missiles and chips. It would be a good thing.

So whatever you're trying to do, whatever you're trying to convey the fact that you have got a, a, a, an entire structure that is at your service in, in, in a total of 60 languages or so if you count them all, seems to be a significant thing and it has a, a huge listenership. Some estimates are 300 million, 400 people, 400 million people around the world.

I was in a taxi just about two weeks ago in Senegal, and the driver was listening to Voice of America on his car radio. So if you've got all these people out there,

Benjamin Wittes: In, in what language, by the way?

Tom Kent:  He was listening in French. But there are many other languages, of course, that they operate in.

And even if you wanna look at it, suppose you wanna look at it from a really cold, hard standpoint, you know, let's take away, you know, democracy and human rights and all of that, which I think there's a lot to be said for, but if you, if you wanna look at it just cold and hard, let's take a country like Congo.

Okay, a country like Congo which has all these strategic minerals and the United States has a great interest in having good relations with, and getting strategic materials and everything else. You have China and everybody else in there. The Voice of America has services in Lingala and Swahili, which are two of the major languages of Congo, in addition to French, which is widely spoken there.

Why would you not want to have a way to communicate directly to these people? If you don't, what are they gonna listen to? You know, they're obviously going to be listening to Chinese, Russian, and Lord knows what else anti- American content. And then when, you know, U.S. mining engineers are trying to operate in Congo, you are going to reap the whirlwind of these people being in a super anti-American mood. So, you know, why wouldn't you want to talk to them?

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, but there's—I mean, USAGM has an additional layer, which is not simply that you wanna talk to them, but you wanna talk to them in a non propagandistic way. Right? You wanna give them actually useful news. You want to have—I, I mean the example that I used in my, in my column about this is you wanna have a newsroom that is actually talking to Ukrainians about Mike Johnson's attitudes toward the supplemental and has a sufficient relationship with Mike Johnson so that he's breaking news through VOA about his plans about the supplemental for Ukraine.

It does not follow from the fact that you want to talk to all these people, that you wanna talk to them in a fashion that is rigorous, that is journalistically serious, that employs people like you to—you know, a longtime reporter and Russia specialist—to run Radio Free Europe. You could put propagandists in charge of that, and many countries do. What is the, what is the case for talking to people in Eastern Congo with serious journalism as opposed to rah rah, Americanism?

Tom Kent: The case is that people can smell propaganda. To suggest that people, even in most distant Congo, cannot tell the difference between propaganda and serious news is to underestimate them.

People are impressed by USAGM covering in-depth what the U.S. has to say and in conducting, then as the VOA charter says, reasonable discussion thereof. So they get the sense from listening to, to our broadcast or reading our websites, that they're getting something with different points of view that will lead to them actually having conversations and maybe leading them to expect from their own media some kind of balanced coverage.

I'll give you an example. During the State of the Union broadcast by, by President Trump, the Voice of America broadcast that worldwide live in languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Persian, and so forth. There was no way that people in, in these countries and with these languages and other languages too, would've gotten such an immediate, such thorough coverage of what Trump had to say. Yes, after that VOA broadcast the Democratic response.

But the message to these people is that the United States is a country where there are different points of view where you don't go to jail for disagreeing with the president, and maybe it would trigger some people to think that, well, this wouldn't be such a bad idea in our country either.

Benjamin Wittes: What do you take to be the administration's beef with VOA? I mean, I've posed a very cynical reason for their action. They've actually articulated a different one, which is that VOA is full of leftist propaganda, which I don't take to be remotely accurate. But I'm, I'm curious, you know, you point out that in the first administration, you know, there was attempt to radically reform USAGM in a, in a more Trumpy direction. What do you understand the motivation and rationale here to be?

Tom Kent: Well, there are a few things. To begin with, USAGM, like any government agency, obviously could be more efficient. People question, why do we need all these different networks? Don't they all do the same thing? Actually, there's an answer that we can come to if you want, as to why we need these different networks, but on the surface, it looks like duplication. It's an agency that, could, could be more efficient in many ways.

As I say, it's headquarters in Washington—VOA headquarters is this huge old rat-infested building, literally. There's a lot that that could be cleaned up literally and figuratively at USAGM. All that said, I don't think that that's primarily what the government is concerned with because any kind of cleaning up or reorganization can be cleaned up and reorganized; it doesn't require getting rid of the organization.

I think what's, what's operating here is that for some years there's been a, a group of people who have thought that USAGM was left wing. I don't think it is, from having followed it very carefully, but they have collected over a decade or so, some examples of, of unfortunate comments on the air, unfortunate posts by individual journalists. I'm sure that if you, if you went to cherry pick any news organization, maybe even Lawfare, you could find something, you know, in the past X years that maybe you wish you'd done differently or someone went a little too far.

So they have, sort of created a, a list of these, of these incidents, which probably number fewer than 20 over the past decade, and have managed to convince a number of conservatives–you can see this reflected in the in the 2025 Project and elsewhere—that this organization is full of some kind of raging leftists.

So if you think that the organization is full of raging leftist journalists and you love the idea of sticking it to leftist journalists, then the opportunity to fire thousands of leftist journalists seems like a great idea, even if you're, if you're cutting off your own ability to speak to the world.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, I mean, one way to think about it is that the administration has an ongoing war on the bureaucracy. It hates the press, and it has various initiatives that are directed at, you know, sort of, contempt for foreigners and this brings all three together, right? It's, it's a war on an American bureaucracy composed of journalists that speaks to foreign countries in foreign languages.

Alright, so you know those of us who have been arguing that this is a real gift to our strategic information competitors, specifically to the Russians, but also the Chinese, what is the—you're, you're a longtime Russia watcher, among other things. What has been the reaction to this in Moscow?

Tom Kent: The Russian government at its highest level officially, is being very diplomatic and saying, well, this is an internal affair for the United States, but Russian commentators on television and elsewhere, of course, are, are turning cartwheels. This is something that the, the Russian authorities have spent endless amounts of time and money trying to block out to their audiences so they won't have that problem anymore. assuming that, that, that these, that these broadcasts do end and these web services do end.

There are all sorts of pro-Russian groups in, in, in East Europe that feel the same way. Regimes like, in, in Hungary feel the same way. The Iranian Ayatollahs will be pleased because USAGM provided multiple services to Iran that for example when they had demonstrations in Iran year or so ago, some big anti-government demonstrations, Iranians knew about these demonstrations in great part because of USAGM broadcasting that let people in one town know it was happening in another. So these are the kinds of people, the kinds of forces that will, will celebrate this.

And certainly throughout the Middle East, all the anti-American contingents there and in Africa, where Russia and China have sharply stepped up their information operations they will increasingly be able to control the information space. And, and sometimes they will even literally take over. There have been cases, for example, when the BBC stopped its broadcasting to the Middle East, in, in, in, in some languages, the Chinese radio took over those very same frequencies. So when people turned on the frequency or they heard the BBC, they would then hear Chinese broadcasting. 

Benjamin Wittes: So what are the prospects, if any, for a reversal of this decision? You mentioned that there's a possibility of litigation. There's also traditionally serious constituencies for these programs in Congress, and they're not just Democrats, right? I mean, these, these are these programming instruments; actually, a lot of them have their origins in conservative politics, the fact that we shouldn't cede information space to the Soviets or to the Chinese, or to the, to the Iranians.

I mean, VOA appears to be really shut down at this point. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are because they're private organizations and you, as you say, there's some money in the bank, they're moving along, but they're gonna have to find alternative funding sources real fast to stay alive.

So my question is, what's the, what's the prospect either for Congress to get involved in a constructive way; for the courts to get involved in a constructive way; or for the executive branch to realize that they've really cut off their nose despite their face here and sort of save some of these organizations or some portions of these organizations?

Tom Kent: You are right that traditionally Congress has had a real bipartisan support for these broadcasters and they were coming from different sides.

When I would go to, to meet with Congress as president of RFERL—and we had to go and explain to them what, what we were doing and justify our budget—some people in Congress would say to me, you know, what we like about you is you broadcast the truth and all sides of, you know, fair and objective and you know, that's really great and that's why we support you.

Other people would say, you know, we hope you're giving Putin a taste of his own medicine, implying that they thought that we should go off and do disinformation or anything else to, to advance America's goals. So whatever you wanted, however you imagined in your, in your mind. USAGM networks to be, there was a strong support.

What there'll be now is, you know, obviously going be a function not only of what people think about RFERL and the other networks, but you know, the American—the overall relationship between the Congress and the President, which is, which is subject to many other factors.

The courts will see; they can demand that USAGM hand this money over to the grantee agencies, but USAGM has many ways—since it administers the funds and does accounting and so forth—has many ways it could probably make life miserable for the, for the, for the grantee networks in any case. There's been talk of the EU; I was just at an EU conference in Brussels a couple days ago, and there's talk of the EU picking up some of the funding for RFE/RL, And that could happen.

But there's, there's a larger question too. And here, you know, maybe we could say something positive potentially about the administration and that is that maybe it considers that USAGM is a rotten old husk. And it's, you know, can think what it wants. But the question then is, so what? So what do you wanna do? I think that the administration ought to realize that there is a value to being able to address foreign populations, whatever the hell we want to tell them, and so there could be some kind of other structure, something potentially more related to the State Department—which is what Project 2025 referred to—or to the National Security Council or, or whatever.

I don't think that the USAGM structure as it exists now is necessarily the only way in the cosmos that this kind of international communication can take place. I think it would've been wise to leave it there while they were figuring out something else. But we are where we are, and if, if the U.S. government comes up with some alternative way to address the world's people in a way that is credible and not just a blast of propaganda that, that, that turns listeners off, then, you know, I suppose there's, there's some future to the whole concept of international communication,

Benjamin Wittes: So that's super optimistic of you and I love that. But I want to ask, is there any evidence that that's what they're thinking?

Tom Kent: I don’t know. I mean, you can always go back to Project 2025 and some of those things are carried out and some of them are not. But there seems to be a recognition among the kinds of people who did that, that we do need to have that communication.

It seems to me that, that if I were the State Department or I were the National Security Council, or I were the Department of Defense, which also has a potent communications capability, that I would want some way to get messages out fast to people. If only because, you know, if we're going to, if we're going to wind up intervening in some country or another, you know, to, to, to free an American or attack terrorists or whatever, it helps a whole lot if a local population knows something about the United States, feels some sympathy for the U.S., understands why the U.S. acts as it does.

It's a, it's a huge force multiplier, if you wanna look at it just in very crudely strategic terms. And the, the incremental cost of having these kinds of broadcasters that can, to use the military terminology, shape the battlefield to affect hearts and minds where U.S. forces may be engaged, where U.S. business may be engaged, where U.S. citizens may be in peril, it sounds of some value.

If you take, take something like the—I referred earlier to Swahili and Lingala services of Voice of America. You know, those services cost a, a million dollars or $2 million. An Apache attack helicopter cost $52 million, so you would hope that when it comes to the point, and it will at some point somewhere that those Apache helicopters have to set down, you would hope that the population there would not be totally under the sway of hostile anti-American propaganda from our adversaries.

Benjamin Wittes: Right. So what's, what is the total cost per annum of USAGM? I know VOA is something like $230, $240 million, but what's the rest of USAGM together?

Tom Kent: You put it all together and it's around $800 million.

Benjamin Wittes: So again, let less than a single one of these highly bespoke weapon systems iterated once.

Tom Kent: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it all depends on how you want to view it. I mean, I obviously am a, I come from a journalism background. I believe in free press. I believe in democracy. I believe in human rights. I believe in modeling responsible journalism because I think that countries that are democracies are less likely to attack each other and create the kinds of wars that the United States seems always to get dragged into. So I think there's a lot to be said for democratic countries.

But even if I were, you know, just, just sitting there in the Pentagon with, you know, you know, a hundred medals on my chest, thinking about, you know, how are we gonna obtain our military objective? I would want to have a capability to have people around the world, on our side.

Benjamin Wittes: So I want to tell you a personal story about VOA offices, different language services, and then just get your response to it.

So as you may know, in one of my non Lawfare lives, I do a series of protests at the Russian Embassy where I use projectors and lasers to put symbols of Ukraine, as well as various obnoxious slogans on the face of the embassy, and the Russians really don't like this. But both, at different times, both the Ukrainian Language service and the Russian language Service of VOA have covered it, and they've covered it in very different ways.

So the Ukrainian language service covered it in, in quite a bit of depth as part of a long story about the Russian Embassy neighborhood and how they have rallied, the block across the street from the embassy has really rallied in favor of Ukraine, and it's kind of like a human interest story about American neighbors of the Russian Embassy rallying to Ukraine. It was, received a lot of attention in Ukraine and, and not the projections in particular, but the, the idea that this neighborhood was kind of rallying to Ukraine.

The Russian language service covered it in a different way, which was that I, when Ambassador Antonnov, the last Russian ambassador, left, I projected a farewell message to him. Russian language service covered that, which I thought was really interesting. They, they kind of broadcast into Russia that some American, you know, guy was, was taunting the Russian ambassador on his way out.

And so I, I, I think it's an interesting like micro-picture of your point that VOA and, and these other AGM services give the United States the ability to talk in fairly micro-targeted ways to individual communities, some of which are language based, some of which are regionally based, about things that maybe the American population doesn't care that much about. So I'm, I'm just interested for your, for any thoughts that that example brings up for you.

Tom Kent: Sure. I mean, one thing that comes to mind is that, you know, what is a Russian to think when he sees a broadcast about how you're projecting images onto the, onto the Russian Embassy.  Now some Russians will think, oh, these are horrible Americans doing all this anti, you know, anti-Russia propaganda.

But at another level, I think the thing that sinks in is that an individual American, you know, this Ben Wittes, whoever he is, has the right to do this. He's not arrested. I mean, he can, he can go and operate from a window across the street or the sidewalk or whatever you do, and, and, and this is like freedom of speech and, and, and this can happen. I mean, I think that is the, you know, the amazing thing.

And, and so a lot of the VOA's coverage of the United States, which on its surface might look, might look one way, can have a different effect. For example, the VOA covered the George Floyd protests in the United States. And if you were, you know, an American propagandist, you might say, well, oh, this is terrible, the VOA shouldn't cover George Floyd demonstrations 'cause it, it, it, it makes American police look bad. But the fact that people could demonstrate against the police in the United States was just stunning for, for, for listeners in so many countries.

And that is, you know, that is really the message. And it makes people think that, gee, you know, despite everything we hear, you know, the Americans have got something there. That, I think, rebounds to our benefit.

Benjamin Wittes: So I wanna ask you to look forward over the next few months. Describe what a, what a positive scenario for the next few months in this area looks like and what a negative—I mean, I suppose a negative scenario is that these organizations wither and die or become simple propaganda outlets. If we're inclined toward optimism, what should we be looking for to happen over the next few weeks and months?

Tom Kent: If we're inclined to optimism, we would look for indications that the State Department or the NSC or somebody is going to get back into the international communication business. That could be through broadcasting, which I think is, is absolutely essential, and web services, kind of all the things that that USAGM does now, perhaps in a different structure.

And also things like, you know, international exchange programs and, and educational programs and things that, that have such a huge impact. When you go abroad, people are always saying, you know, important people are always saying, when I was a student, I got this, this this trip to the U.S. through the U.S. State Department that paid for it. And ever since then, you know, I've really understood the United States and I'm, and I'm a fan.

So all this international communication is, is important. I think it's strategically important; I think it's militarily important; I think it's economically important, and I, I can't imagine that we would wanna leave that completely fallow.

In terms of other optimism or pessimism, a huge amount of it, in my mind, turns around the 10 USAGM journalists who are currently in prison in places like Vietnam, Iran, Belarus, Russia, and I'm just horrified at the thought that the U.S. government will just sort of let them rot. That, you know, they'll take away the organizations that they worked for and that the U.S. embassies in these countries, you know, sensing the hostility toward these organizations by the administration will do nothing.

I mean, this administration's been pretty good at, at getting out of jail a number of Americans and, and people who are close to U.S. interest in various ways, so my, my greatest hope is that these people will not be forgotten.

Benjamin Wittes: Thomas Kent teaches at Columbia University. He is the author of “Striking Back: Overt and Covert Options to Combat Russian Disinformation.” and of course, he was the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty prior to 2018. Tom, thanks so much for joining us today.

Tom Kent: Thanks so much.

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