A U.S. Retreat in the War of Ideas
20th March 2025
Wall Street Journal, a Voice of the Crust.
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.
Not our government’s job. Trump is not an idealist. Idealism costs money … and lives. Idealism is what gets us into neo-con Forever Wars.
On Saturday Mr. Trump 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. This is a retreat in the global war of ideas.
This ‘global war of ideas’ is also not the job of our government. As Thomas Jefferson famously said: We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarantors only of our own.
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.
The fall of Soviet Communism, which represented an existential threat to the U.S., made this sort of propaganda obsolete–not to mention the fact that Democrat administrations used it to propagate Wokeness around the world. America has no difficulty getting its message across; the Internet allows people around the world to see what America is truly like, the good and the bad. It doesn’t need taxpayer subsidies.