Food security experts warn Gaza is at critical risk of famine if Israel
doesn't end its campaign
[May 12, 2025]
By CHRISTINE FERNANDO
CHICAGO (AP) — Growing up in the former Soviet Union, Pedro Spivakovsky-Gonzalez’s
father and grandparents would listen to Voice of America with their ears
pressed to the radio, trying to catch words through the government’s
radio jamming.
The U.S.-funded news service was instrumental in helping them understand
what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, before they
moved to the United States in the 1970s.
“It was a window into another world,” Spivakovsky-Gonzalez said. “They
looked to it as a sort of a beacon of freedom. They were able to imagine
a different world from the one they were living in.”
When Spivakovsky-Gonzalez and his family heard of President Donald
Trump’s attempts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media — the
agency that oversees VOA, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia –- he
said it was a “gut punch.”
The first months of the second Trump administration have delivered blow
after blow to American efforts to promote democracy abroad and pierce
the information wall of authoritarian governments through programs that
had been sustained over decades by presidents of both political parties.
The new administration has decimated the Agency for Global Media,
restructured the State Department to eliminate a global democracy office
and gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, which just
last year launched an initiative to try to halt democratic backsliding
across the globe. In all, the moves represent a retrenchment from the
U.S. role in spreading democracy beyond its borders.
Experts say the moves will create a vacuum for promoting freedom and
representative government, and could accelerate what many see as
anti-democratic trends around the world.
“The United States has historically been the leading power in spreading
democracy globally. Despite different administrations, that has remained
the case –- until now,” said Staffan Lindberg, a political science
professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
Targeting a broad swath of democracy and civil society initiatives
David Salvo, managing director for the Alliance for Securing Democracy
at the German Marshall Fund, said promoting democracy abroad has been “a
pillar of American foreign policy in the last 50 years” as a means of
ensuring more stable, peaceful relationships with other countries,
reducing the threat of conflict and war, and fostering economic
cooperation.
Yet among Trump’s early actions was targeting democracy programs through
the State Department and USAID, which had launched a new global
democracy initiative at the tail end of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidency.
The Treasury Department halted funding to the National Endowment for
Democracy, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April he would
shutter a State Department office that had a mission to build “more
democratic, secure, stable, and just societies.”
Funding cuts have hit the National Democratic Institute, the
International Foundation for Electoral Systems and U.S. nonprofits that
have worked for decades “to inject resources into environments so that
civil society and democratic actors can try to effect change for the
better,” including through bolstering unstable democracies against
autocrats, Salvo said.
Whether global democracy programs are worth funding was central to a
hearing Thursday held by a U.S. House Foreign Affairs subcommittee as
Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Fla., repeatedly asked how to “ensure our return
on investment is really high.”
About 1.2% of the federal budget went to foreign aid in the 2023 fiscal
year, according to the Pew Research Center.
“I understand the committee is interested in how we can improve ... and
get back to basics,” Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman
from New Jersey and assistant secretary of state for democracy, human
rights and labor under President Barack Obama, told lawmakers. “The
problem is the administration is eliminating the basics right now.”
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Lisa Brakel poses at the Bedford Branch Library in Temperance,
Mich., Tuesday, May 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
Uzra Zeya, who leads the international nonprofit Human Rights First
after serving in the Biden State Department, said it was
“heartbreaking and alarming" to watch the U.S. essentially dismantle
its democracy and human rights programs.
"The potential long-term impacts are devastating for U.S. national
security and prosperity," she said.
Diminishing the messaging pipelines for freedom
For more than 80 years, VOA and its related outlets have delivered
news across the world, including to more than 427 million people
every week in 49 languages, according to a 2024 internal report. The
broadcaster began during World War II to provide Germans with news,
even as Nazi officials attempted to jam its signals. The Soviet
Union and China attempted to silence its broadcasts during the Cold
War. Iranian and North Korean governments have also tried to block
access to VOA for decades.
But the most successful attempt to silence VOA has been through its
own government. It was effectively shut down in March through an
executive order.
Lisa Brakel, a 66-year-old retired librarian in Temperance,
Michigan, said VOA was a “mainstay” when she was a music teacher in
Kuwait in the 1980s. She and her colleagues would listen together in
the apartment complex where the American teachers were housed, using
it as a way to stay up-to-date with U.S. news.
“When I saw the news, I thought, ‘No, they can’t shut this down. Too
many people depend on that,’” Brakel said. “As a librarian, any cuts
to free access to information deeply concern me.”
Cuts will likely embolden US competitors
The broadcaster’s future remains in flux after a federal appellate
court paused a ruling that would have reversed its dismantling. This
was just a day after journalists were told they would soon return to
work after being off the air for almost two months. Even if they are
allowed back, it's not clear the mission would be the same. This
past week, the Trump administration agreed to use the conservative
and heavily pro-Trump media network OAN’s feed on VOA and other
services.
In Asia, dismantling Radio Free Asia would mean losing the world’s
only independent Uyghur language news service, closing the Asia Fact
Check Lab as it reports on misinformation from the Chinese Community
Party, and curbing access to information in countries such as China,
North Korea and Myanmar that lack free and independent media, the
broadcaster’s president, Bay Fang, said in a statement.
“Their invaluable work is part of RFA’s responsibility to uphold the
truth so that dictators and despots don’t have the last word,” Fang
wrote in May in The New York Times.
Experts who monitor global democracy said the information gap
created by the administration will embolden U.S. competitors such as
Russia and China, which already are at work trying to shape public
opinion.
Barbara Wejnert, a political sociologist at the University at
Buffalo, who studies global democracies, said diplomatic efforts
through U.S. broadcasters and democracy nonprofits helped
precipitate a “rapid increase in democratizing countries” in the
late 20th century.
“Especially today when the truth is distorted and people don’t trust
governments, spreading the notion of freedom and democracy through
media is even more vital,” she said.
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