Briefing Room—March 17, 2025
This week we discuss President Trump mothballing Voice of America, J.D. Vance on why Europe needs to remember its Christian roots, Canada’s “trade war” with America, St. Patrick, and more!
VOICE OF AMERICA WAS OUTDATED TECHNOLOGY. On Friday, President Trump maximally reduced the activities of the United States Agency for Global Media, an umbrella organization including major platforms such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. For Cold War buffs, Voice of America or RFE/RL might bring back halcyon memories of America’s stalwart determination to beam media from a Western perspective into the Eastern bloc countries, and into Communist-controlled countries throughout the world.
Putatively VOA existed to broadcast America’s long-term viewpoints into countries throughout the world. But VOA had long since ceased to be that. “From top-to-bottom,” said USAGM and its senior adviser Kari Lake in a press release, “this agency is a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer—a national security risk for this nation—and irretrievably broken. While there are bright spots within the agency with personnel who are talented and dedicated public servants, this is the exception rather than the rule.”
Over decades, projects like VOA (and related initiatives like USAID) came to view themselves as immune to oversight from the current political administration. Now if American foreign policy were operating on a coherent long-term strategy, with clear goals and a widely supported, cross-partisan effort to support those goals, such consistency would be fine.
But what we are seeing is that President Trump doesn’t simply want to shift American foreign policy a bit one way or the other, but that he wants to recreate it for much better competition in the new, multipolar world. Doing that will require returning to our fundamental values and sources of strength, not just more of the same. Hence, no VOA. —GJP
EUROPE HAS TO STOP ITS OWN “CIVILIZATIONAL SUICIDE,” said the vice president in a Thursday interview with Laura Ingraham. J. D. Vance returned to the themes of his speech at the Munich Security Conference, when he had chided European nations for abandoning their identities in favor of mass migration and an ever-present security discourse. After that, some Europeans concluded that the United States was rejecting the idea of an alliance based on shared values...
