WHO WİLL SPEAK FOR AMERİCA?
NED, NDI, IRI, VOA, RFE/RL, Radio Marti, Radio Free Asia, and more were the instruments through which America advanced its interests by putting its back behind its values.
The Trump administration is trying to shut down the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), all of which receive U.S. government funding. It has silenced, at least for now, the Voice of America (VOA), which had been operating every day since its birth in 1942. It is also trying to destroy other government-supported media, including Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL), Radio Martí (broadcasting to Cuba), and Radio Free Asia (reaching China and Southeast Asia).
All these organizations have missions to advance American interests by advancing American values, including the rule of law, democracy, and a free press. (Full disclosure, I am on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.) The administration has not provided much explanation for these moves, besides calling the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the umbrella organization for VOA, RFE/RL, and the other media, “a giant rot,” and Elon Musk calling NED “a scam.”
What’s going on? Why such animus against instruments intended to advance both American interests and what both political parties used to think of as American values? It’s a long story.
As the United States rose to world leadership, it did so not only in the name of its own national interests narrowly or transactionally defined. Instead, it did so in the name of universal values, a breathtaking and, to the European imperial powers, it sought to supplant, infuriating self-confidence. Americans were slow to conclude that U.S. national interests and the universal values of freedom were linked. President Abraham Lincoln famously argued that the American nation was based not on common blood but on the values of the Declaration of Independence that are applicable to “all men and all times.” That suggested that U.S. national interests were somehow tied to such foundational values. President William McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, whose first big job was as Lincoln’s private secretary, made in 1899 and 1900 a values-based case against European and Japanese imperialist designs against China, the once-famous “Open Door Policy.” (Of course, Hay also presided over the United States’ own imperial grab of Spanish colonies in the Spanish-American War of 1898.)
President Woodrow Wilson, for all his flaws and hypocrisies, laid out the first full case for U.S. strategy based on universal values. His “14 Points” speech of January 1918 was the first systematic expression of what we now call a rules-based, liberal order. This was neither cant nor vapid “Wilsonian idealism.” It was, rather, a canny realization that U.S. national interests would be better served not by becoming another imperial power like its World War I allies Britain and France, with its own sphere of influence in rivalry with that of other great powers, but by emerging as the leader and rule setter of a generalized international order.
Wilson was too far ahead of his country. His vision faltered and failed, and the United States retreated from its ambitious goal of global leadership, leaving the international field clear for the rise of rapacious new tyrannies, Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Germany, and Imperial Japan. The so-called “isolationists” of the 1930s argued up until Pearl Harbor that the United States had no real national interest in trying to stop Hitler, nor in defending either Europe’s beleaguered democracies, nor in defending the principles of international order. The result was catastrophic: tens of millions dead in a war that the United States might have forestalled had it acted in time.
With isolationists discredited, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt rebooted the Hay-Wilson view of values—democracy and rules—as the underpinning of international order that the United States would champion. The 1941 Atlantic Charter issued by Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill was a follow-up to Wilson’s 14 Points: it outlined as war aims not just the defeat of Germany but the establishment of a liberal world order to emerge from eventual victory.
This was the strategic context in which the U.S. government organized itself to advance democracy as a national cause. Voice of America was an early result. It was intended to be the voice not just of U.S. government policy, but of the deeper values of international order and democracy that the U.S. declared it would champion. When WWII ended with the Soviet Union occupying a third of Europe, the Truman administration decided to oppose Soviet communism in the name of those same values. It established Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to function as a surrogate free press for countries under Soviet communist domination, again, in the service of a liberal (or free) world order.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan put America’s back into support for democracy by directly assisting democratic activists around the world. NED was the institutional result. Few today can recall the boldness of this initiative: the foreign policy establishment of the time (I joined the U.S. foreign service in 1977 and remember this vividly) regarded Soviet, Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic, and other dissidents from behind the Iron Curtain with impatient distain, regarding their cause as hopeless and their impact as merely destabilizing. But Reagan had a better idea. NED took these dissidents seriously and provided them with the tools to advance their cause of national freedom in a democratic form. Smuggling parts for mimeograph machines (those of the current generation can look up what that was) to Poland’s underground press through the Swedish rat line was just one of those initiatives. The cause of freedom for the nations under Soviet tyranny was hopeless. Until it wasn’t.
There is no better proof of concept of U.S. support for freedom than the democratic revolutions of 1989-91 that brought down the Soviet Empire in Europe and the Soviet Union itself.
The linking of values and interests paid off. But that was then.
While the Trump administration’s worldview seems inconsistent, part of Trump world seems skeptical or even hostile to the identification of U.S. interests with universal democratic values, a linkage that has been the foundation of U.S. strategic thinking since Pearl Harbor. Its language often draws on that of the original America First movement, especially that U.S. national interests must be distinguished from values or from democracy and instead be rooted in harder, more immediate objectives. As Vice President J.D. Vance eloquently put it in his Republican Convention speech accepting the nomination, “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.” That is a powerful point. It suggests that America has little real interest in democracy in the world. But Lincoln’s point is even more powerful: the American nation is, in fact, founded on the basis of abstractions, especially the proposition that all men are created equal. If Lincoln is right, America’s interests really are served by supporting America’s values.
That does not mean that every policy conducted in the name of advancing democracy gets a pass. Valid principles are not enough. The Vietnam War and the Iraq War were both fought in the name of advancing freedom. They worked out poorly. The flawed thinking and application in both those cases were so great that the resulting failure and mess tended to compromise the underlying rationale. Even valid principles will not protect against foolish application.
But abandoning an American grand strategy rooted in support for democracy and freedom will bring nothing good.
Tyranny has been making a comeback. Russia and China, like the German and Japanese aggressors of the twentieth century, seem to believe that the tide of history is moving toward autocracy at home and spheres of influence maintained by force. Russia seeks to restore its empire. It started with war against Georgia in 2008 and has moved against Ukraine. It will not stop there unless stopped. China seeks to carve out its own version of empire, targeting the Philippines and Taiwan. Local authoritarian rulers, often (though not always) aligned with Russia, are trying to tighten their grips at home.
But tyrants are meeting resistance. Ukrainians are fighting in the name of their own nation and the name of universal values. Demonstrators in Hungary, Serbia, Georgia, and Turkey are showing sustained commitment to both democracy and patriotism rooted in universal values. Those American institutions created to advance freedom and democracy, and thereby to advance American interests also rooted in those values, have a mission as important as during the Cold War.
May 8 marked the eightieth anniversary of Allied victory over Nazi Germany. President Donald Trump called on Americans to celebrate that victory. He is right. And as we honor this victory, we should remember that what we celebrate is not might but might in the service of right. As Truman said in his Victory Day proclamation in 1946,
“I call upon the people of the United States to observe Victory Day as a day of solemn commemorations of the devotion of the men and women by whose sacrifices victory was achieved, and as a day of prayer and of high resolve that the cause of justice, freedom, peace, and international good-will shall be advanced with undiminished and unremitting efforts.”
After 1945, for all its flaws and blunders, America was indeed an exceptional great power, one that owed its existence to universal values and—despite the inconsistency and blunders—took them seriously as a guide as it rose to world leadership. NED, NDI, IRI, VOA, RFE/RL, Radio Marti, Radio Free Asia, and more were the instruments through which America advanced its interests by putting its back behind its values, as Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan said it should. America applied might to advance right.
President Trump likes winning. The United States won WWII; it won the Cold War; it can win the struggles of the twenty-first century if it remains true to its founding principles and values and pursues them smartly.
About the author: Daniel Fried
Amb. Daniel Fried is the Atlantic Council Weiser Family Distinguished Fellow and former United States Ambassador to Poland.
Image: Algi Febri Sugita / Shutterstock.com
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