The Situation: Unilateral Disarmament in the Information Wars

The Situation on Sunday assessed the state of the Full-Scale Situation two months in. 

While I was writing that column, President Trump destroyed Voice of America, which has represented this country on airwaves worldwide since World War II. An executive order declared that the parent organization of the VOA would shrink to its minimum statutory functions. The staff of 1,300 was immediately placed on administrative leave and then let go entirely.

I understand the decision completely.

If a president doesn’t want to counter Russian disinformation, there is no reason to broadcast high-quality news in Russian. In fact, doing so is counterproductive. People might believe it.

If a president doesn’t want to counter Chinese disinformation, there is no reason to broadcast high-quality news in Chinese. In fact, doing so is counterproductive. People might believe it.

If a president doesn’t want to undermine autocracies in the Middle East, there is no reason to broadcast high-quality news in Arabic or Persian. In fact, doing so is counterproductive. People might believe it.

And if a president wants to broadcast sycophantic propaganda about himself, VOA doesn’t do much good either. Its firewall and charter, after all, have long protected its remarkable news services from being propaganda arms of incumbent American administrations. 

And let’s face it, unlike some of those domestic-facing agencies Trump is taking on, destroying VOA is also easy. It has no particular constituency at home. It does not distribute checks to voters. It does not run national parks or fund schools. It doesn’t build roads or do cancer research. It does not, in fact, really engage with Americans much at all.

And that’s by design. America doesn’t need VOA to speak to Americans. There’s a vibrant free press here. America needs VOA to talk to people in countries where that’s not true.

Thus, VOA’s audience of 354 million people per week, who consume its contents in nearly 50 different languages, is largely abroad. It broadcasts to places in the world short on high quality news. It broadcasts to people whose alternative sources of information tend to be highly propagandistic. And it provides to them a genuine service—the service of truthful, reliable information branded with “America.” 

You get now why President Trump is shutting it down? It’s not, in fact, that VOA is—as the White House now alleges—putting "taxpayers . . . on the hook for radical propaganda.” It’s that if you don’t believe that the concepts of truthful, reliable information and America are meaningfully tied—and Trump clearly does not—there’s no reason to have a VOA. Indeed, Trump is so committed to decoupling them that running a high-quality newsroom is not merely off-brand, it’s kind of dangerous. The truth, after all, can get in the way of cozying up to dictators.

Besides, while VOA is a bargain in governmental budgetary terms, running an actual newsroom that can broadcast real news all over the world and meet people in the languages they speak does cost some money—about three times as much every year as Trump owes in sexual assault and defamation judgments. And spending money to reveal one’s own lies doesn’t make sense.

I have worked with VOA a fair bit over the years. The head of it, until this weekend, was an old Washington Post colleague and friend—a first-rate journalist named Mike Abramowitz, who wrote on Facebook:

VOA promotes freedom and democracy around the world by telling America’s story and by providing objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny. Even if the agency survives in some form, the actions being taken today by the Administration will severely damage Voice of America’s ability to foster a world that is safe and free and in doing so is failing to protect U.S. interests.
For more than 80 years, Voice of America has been a priceless asset for the United States, playing an essential role in the fight against communism, fascism, and oppression, and in the fight for freedom and democracy around the world. Today, VOA reaches more than 360 million people every week, in 48 languages. In many dictatorships, VOA is often the only reliable source of news and information.

At the ground level, I have worked with journalists from both the Russian language service and the Ukrainian language service—both of which have sometimes covered my Russian embassy protest activities. It mattered to me a great deal that some news organization covered my Russian embassy projection in Russian—that Russians worldwide could access the fact that someone was shining lights on their embassy in Washington. Think of all the actually important news that this tiny anecdote represents. That is part of what VOA does. 

But there’s more. VOA journalists routinely get interesting bits of news that filter back into the American conversation. During the appropriations fight over the Ukraine supplemental last year, for example, my friend Kateryna Lisunova of the Ukrainian language service developed a unique role in the entire press corps on Capitol Hill: House Speaker Mike Johnson would ignore other reporters’ questions about the supplemental but would often take questions from her on the subject. It was through her that he ultimately signalled that he was looking for a solution in which Ukraine aid would pass the House. 

Lisunova wrote on Facebook recently:

[D]uring the Chornobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, many Ukrainians first learned about it through VOA radio broadcasts from the U.S. But even more recently, I’ve been receiving messages from Ukrainians living under Russian occupation in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. They reached out to tell me they were watching every VOA show. For them, it was a glimpse of freedom and hope for future liberation. 

This is what the United States gives up when it gives up VOA. It gives up the ability to speak to Russians in Russia, to Ukrainians under occupation. Play that out all over the world—in dozens of languages and scores of countries. It gives up the ability to be the glimpse of freedom and hope for liberation in countries everywhere.

And that is exactly the point.

Because Trump has contempt for that vision of the United States. He has contempt for the notion that knowing the truth might set anyone free—or that, indeed, people under the yoke of tyranny should aspire to freedom and should look to the United States as any kind of beacon of that freedom. To him, the tyrants are the deal-makers, and what good is a little information service that might annoy the tyrants with whom he wants to do business? What good is an information service that might tell the tyrants’ people the truth about their leaders, much less the truth about Trump’s interactions with their leaders? He and the tyrants alike are at war with the truth. And if you want to lie about who is and who is not a dictator and who did and did not start a war, why would you simultaneously fund a bunch of Mike Abramowitzes and Kateryna Lisunovas who go around making sure people can get high-quality information in their own languages? 

Think of it as unilateral disarmament in the information wars. And think of it as part and parcel of a lot of other unilateral American disarmaments going on in the first weeks of the second Trump administration. Unilateral disarmament in the information space is part and parcel of unilaterally conceding key negotiating latitude to Russia over the heads of the Ukrainians. It is part and parcel of unilaterally undermining the core security underpinnings of NATO. It is part and parcel of publicly endorsing Russophillic far-right parties in European countries. It is part and parcel of a policy of destroying decades of relations with friendly nations with trade policies based on deranged and ever-shifting factual claims.

Post by Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev on X, March 16, 2025. 

Why? Because all of these policies depend on lies. And people who build policies on the basis of lies are always ultimately going to be on a collision course with a newsroom devoted to high-quality information and truth.

In a speech at VOA on its 40th anniversary, then-President Ronald Reagan harkened back to the organization’s founding during World War II: “In those days, as now, truth was a vital part of America's arsenal,” he said.

“By giving an objective account of current world events, by communicating a clear picture of America and our policies at home and abroad, the Voice serves the interests not only of the United States but of the world. The Voice of America is for many the only source of reliable information in a world where events move very quickly.”

Since “truth” and an “objective account of current world events” are no longer virtues that favor US policies but, rather, now inconvenience America’s positions in the world, Trump has very rationally concluded that America shouldn’t have a Voice any longer other than his own.

It makes sense, right?

So what was on VOA instead of quality news yesterday? This.

The Situation continues tomorrow.