The Voice of America Falls Silent
The battle of the airwaves was vital for promoting freedom during the Cold War. Trump abandons it at our peril.
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On February 21, 1990, Václav Havel, the Czechoslovakian dissident turned president, received a rapturous welcome from a packed U.S. Congress. In his speech, Havel recalled that just months earlier he had been arrested by Europe’s most conservative communist government in a society that “slumbered beneath the pall of a totalitarian system.”
But now he stood before Congress “as the representative of a country that has set out on the road to democracy, a country where there is complete freedom of speech.” Havel’s address symbolized the culmination of decades of U.S. efforts to defeat communism by championing free expression and open information—ideals the Soviet Bloc had long suppressed.
By contrast, under the Trump administration’s “America First” policy, international efforts to promote democracy are at risk of being drastically reduced. The administration has set about defunding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which supports dissidents in authoritarian states.
As America retreats from promoting freedom of information and expression abroad, while simultaneously restricting it at home, the world is in danger of losing its most vocal and decisive global champion of free speech. This comes at a time when the global free speech recession is deepening, pressured by an emboldened alliance of authoritarian states.
Free Speech as Soft Power
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt highlighted America’s crucial role in championing free speech globally when he listed “freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world” as the first of his “four essential human freedoms.” After defeating Nazism, the primary threat to information freedom shifted to Stalin’s Soviet Union and its allies.
It fell to FDR’s widow and inaugural Chair of the Commission on Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, to champion the fight to enshrine a robust commitment to free expression in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), resisting Soviet-led efforts to insert broad bans against hate speech and false information that would no doubt be weaponized against dissenters in authoritarian states.
Adopting strong international standards was just one part of a multipronged strategy to advance freedom of expression. Faced with communist states that still sent dissenters to gulags and operated a multilayered system of censorship, providing access to information was as vital as defending the principle of free speech itself.
Accordingly, the United States established radio stations such as Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE) to pierce the Iron Curtain with broadcasts offering news and commentary in local languages. These outlets offered an alternative to the distorted image presented by government propaganda and censorship.
This strategy would pay rich dividends. While the Soviet Bloc had done its best to spoil meaningful protection of free speech in international human rights standards, they endorsed newly adopted human rights conventions as part of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Though human rights were repellant to communist states, Moscow cynically saw them as cost-free diplomatic concessions in exchange for Western recognition of existing European borders. That was a serious miscalculation. Through underground samizdat publishers and Western radio broadcasts, Central and Eastern Europeans quickly learned about the new rights that their governments had now solemnly promised to respect.
Emboldened by the Helsinki agreement, dissidents throughout the Soviet Bloc acted as if their governments had embraced human rights in good faith—not as cynical diplomacy. This included Havel, who was involved in drafting the famous Charter 77, which explicitly protested violations of freedom of expression as guaranteed in the international human rights instruments that the Czechoslovakian government had accepted as part of the Helsinki agreement.
The communist states tried hard to contain the damage. They jammed Western radio broadcasts and cracked down on those who took their messages to heart. A young Czech called Jiří Gans was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for listening to Voice of America and founding the Club of Friends of American Music.
Under President Reagan, the United States doubled down on human rights and democracy promotion (albeit with blind spots for anti-communist regimes), setting up the National Endowment of Democracy (NED) in 1983. Reagan’s message was clear: “We can and should be proud of our message of democracy. Democracies respect individual liberties and human rights. They respect freedom of expression, political participation, and peaceful cooperation.” Ultimately, the so-called “Helsinki Effect”—inspired by principles and powered by broadcast technology and a growing human rights movement—played an important role in empowering dissidents behind the Iron Curtain.
Havel would later recount how American radio broadcasts “informed us truthfully of events around the world and in our country as well, and in this way, you helped to bring about the peaceful revolution.” Even the notorious East German spymaster Marcus Wolf conceded that, of all the means used to influence people behind the Iron Curtain, institutions like RFE were “the most effective.”
After the Cold War, Václav Havel urged President Clinton to continue funding RFE, and helped relocate its headquarters to Prague’s former Communist parliament, transforming it into a symbol of democratic renewal. RFE has since broadened its mission to counter authoritarianism across 23 countries, reaching nearly 50 million people in 27 languages—including in Russia, Belarus, and Iran. And since 1996, Radio Free Asia has delivered uncensored news in nine languages to six Asian nations, including Mandarin-speaking audiences.
The Return of Autocracy, Inc.
However, for over a decade, free speech and democracy have sharply declined around the globe, and institutions once focused on spreading these values are now fighting to prevent further erosion where they had been secured.
2012 was a defining year. It marked the ascent of Xi Jinping to Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party and the reelection of Vladimir Putin as President of Russia. With the rise of this authoritarian alliance, the need to actively promote free expression is greater than at any time since the Cold War.
Both Russia and China have implemented ever more repressive systems of high-tech censorship in order to control the public sphere. All major American social media platforms are banned in China. Russia allows only a throttled version of YouTube. In Putin’s Russia, more people have been prosecuted for speech crimes than during Brezhnev and Khrushchev’s rule in the post-Stalin Soviet era. In China, surveillance and censorship are deeply interwoven into most parts of daily life, allowing the government to track its citizens at scale. In 2013, the Chinese Communist Party circulated a secret memo known as “Document 9,” which sought to expand state-driven propaganda and enforce ideological conformity in China by targeting “false ideological trends,” including Western constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, and press freedom.
Xi and Putin have also joined forces. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) operates as a counterforce to Western democratic principles. In 2017, SCO members including Russia, China, and Central Asian states signed a Convention on Combating Extremism that disguises efforts to stifle dissent and control civil society as anti-extremism measures, broadly criminalizing activities that incite discord.
Alarmingly, China and Russia—working in tandem—are also pushing these repressive norms at the UN, aiming to delegitimize Western views while endorsing a model that prioritizes state control over traditional and social media, the internet, and, increasingly, AI.
Accordingly, the stakes for global freedom of expression are very high indeed. Not only do European democracies lack economic and military clout, but they are actively undermining free speech at home with broad bans on hate speech and disinformation. Without a robust U.S. effort to uphold this value, at home and abroad, the free speech recession is likely to worsen.
In his book The Power of the Powerless, Havel described authoritarian regimes as “permeated with hypocrisy and lies”—places where “the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom” and “farcical elections ... the highest form of democracy.” He also warned that a state that suppresses its people not only harms its citizens but also “becomes a danger to its neighbors,” as “a manipulated population can be misused for any military adventure.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s threats against Taiwan prove this point.
As such, despite the Trump administration’s claims to the contrary, there’s no contradiction between America First and vigorously defending America’s First Freedom abroad.
Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.
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Jacob, your academic bag is obviously "Free Speech" the bedrock without which Democracy cannot flourish. No one would disagree with that ideal.
But it would seem that this article is to again just to critisise and trash anything associated with the policies of the incoming administration of the democratically elected POTUS.
The Cold War was very different to what ails the world now with respect to authoritarian regimes and the attempt of many countries to shutter free speech.
Quote; "Accordingly, the stakes for global freedom of expression are very high indeed. Not only do European democracies lack economic and military clout, but they are actively undermining free speech at home with broad bans on hate speech and disinformation. Without a robust U.S. effort to uphold this value, at home and abroad, the free speech recession is likely to worsen."
One praises your altruism in this matter, but remove the beam from your eye before removing the mot from your brothers. The world has moved on and America is no model of purity in the attitude of for example, the left of the Democrat controlled States and the national Party, who continually attempt to shutter free speech in America, usuing the usual cloak of leftish ideology namely “sacrificial altruism.”
That and America is not "the policeman" of the World and Europe and the Westrern World indeed as you say "European democracies lack economic and military clout..."the reason being American interest and largess in supplying the dollars and technology without being fairly compensated for this military protection.
Vance has said America does not want European countries as vassals, which in military terms they most certainly are. America wants these countries to be freemen, masters and lords of their own destiny, and not relianant on America to tell them what to do or protect them from some other evil, military power.
The need for free speech has to come from within the populace of a country. It cannot be enforced but one agrees, free speech needs the support of all democracies and not just America alone.