By Jacob Mchangama
The battle of the airwaves was vital for promoting freedom during the Cold War. Trump abandons it at our peril.
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.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).