As American and Israeli forces attack Iran, a critical weapon in our arsenal is badly broken. An enemy missile or a cyberattack did not destroy it; it was dismantled from within, a victim of Donald Trump’s shortsightedness.
The gutting of America’s international broadcasting and public-diplomacy tools—specifically the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), and the Voice of America’s (VOA) Persian service—amounts to unilateral disarmament in the information war. It is a mammoth strategic blunder, the consequences of which are coming into relief. Just as the administration has spurned allies and is now begging for their help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, it has taken a hatchet to these public diplomacy tools and is hastily trying to rebuild them.
The Trump administration’s animus toward these agencies was modest in the first term and zealous in this most recent one. It purged experienced personnel, smearing them as “deep state” enemies, and pushed out those who had the institutional memory and linguistic skills to undermine the Iranian regime. Think of the McCarthyite purges of China experts after Mao Zedong’s revolution.
Our Mideast specialists had a firm grasp of the subtle cultural and political nuances that shape what Iranians watch, read, and share. While our broadcasts were often imperfect and frequently lampooned as propaganda, they were generally high-quality. They were assuredly run by those whose work could inform, persuade, and, at times, embolden people against their oppressors. Firing them was akin to sacking your best intelligence analysts on the eve of battle, then pretending you could replace them overnight with political loyalists who wielded talking points instead of real knowledge.
The Trump jihad against these public diplomacy agencies was not subtle. After months of Orwellian attacks casting the State Department’s Global Engagement Center as a domestic “censorship” shop rather than a shield against Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down the agency. About 120 specialists and roughly $61 million annually were focused on tracking, exposing, and countering foreign propaganda streams. At almost the same time, the administration turned its sights on independent agencies outside State’s purview, including the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and on VOA itself, America’s flagship international broadcaster.
In March 2025, VOA broadcasts were halted under a Trump executive order, and around 1,400 journalists and other staff were laid off. Persian‑language staff were not spared; some had their badges confiscated and were locked out of the building, but were then summoned back on short notice last year when Iran again seized the headlines. A federal court would later suspend much of this dismantling and order the reinstatement of more than 500 VOA journalists and staff. But court orders cannot easily restore trust, expertise, or the time lost in silence.
Kari Lake, illegally appointed as Trump’s chief at USAGM, had the gall to portray herself as its saviour, but tried to tell a different story. The former broadcaster, who still maintains she won the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, told interviewers that she expanded coverage to reach Iranians in their hour of need. There is some truth here. When protests and then war put Iran at the top of the news, the administration scrambled to patch the huge problem.
During the 12-day attack on Iranian nuclear facilities back in June, the service added extra Farsi broadcasting, but it cut back again after hostilities ceased. For a brief window, Washington remembered that information is a weapon. VOA Persian has again tried to ramp up but is still operating on a reduced schedule. If you burn down a house and then lend a hand rebuilding it, you’re not a hero.
Lake’s tenure coincided with the shutdown of VOA broadcasts, mass layoff notices, and the months‑long exile of the very Farsi‑speaking journalists she later rushed back into service, while adding new broadcasters considered extreme ideologues by some Iranian diaspora groups and royalists. Lake emptied the reservoir of talent, scurried to refill it with some seasoned veterans and many mediocrities, and then tried to turn a firehose on Tehran. VOA staffers are now suing Lake.
The bigger USAGM story is similar: in aggregate, the agency boasts a record weekly audience of roughly 427 million across its networks—a number Trump allies cite as proof that the system is thriving. Yet those top‑line figures conceal where the damage to specialized services like VOA Persian and in analytic units like the GEC—a unit whose absence is now felt most acutely as the U.S. tries to understand and combat Iran’s active information warfare against us.
This folly is dangerously compounded by reality on the ground. Iranians face a near‑total information blackout, with the regime severing or throttling internet access for much of its population. Into this void, America should be flooding the nation with credible information and messages of solidarity and hope—explaining what is happening, countering regime lies, and giving Iranians a sense of a post‑Ayatollah Khamenei future. Instead, we are improvising ad‑hoc campaigns from institutions that have just survived demolition.
Yes, the Israelis are providing a vital media surrogate: Persian language television programming that reaches parts of Iran where there is still electricity. So are others: BBC Persian, London‑based Iran International, and a constellation of diaspora channels continue to beam in news and commentary.
But as any military planner knows, outsourcing a core capability is not a strategy but a stopgap. Controlling the information domain is essential to blunting Iranian propaganda, encouraging defections from the Revolutionary Guards and the civilian bureaucracy, and sketching a democratic horizon for the Iranian populace.
America once understood this. During the Cold War, U.S.‑backed broadcasters helped crack open closed societies from Havana to Hanoi. I have first-hand knowledge, having done extensive work for German shortwave broadcaster Deutsche Welle and Sweden’s Radio Sweden International.
Stockholm was my home for a couple of years, and my reports in the early 1980s reached deep into the Soviet Union, thanks to the network’s proximity to its antennas. Years after broadcasting into the USSR, NBC Radio-Mutual News assigned me to be a Moscow correspondent, where I once met a Soviet influencer who told me he and his friends used to listen to me, especially to the rock music and satire sketches the station ran on Saturdays He even cited one of my sketches—Whiskey on the Rocks—about a Whiskey-class Soviet submarine stranded on underwater rocks in a Swedish archipelago. My work was a decade old, but its impact was alive.
My book Spin Wars & Spy Games highlighted the importance of global state media and its role in influencing elites and setting agendas, but also pointed out the seldom-discussed—and often hidden—performance of diplomatic and intelligence functions by these organizations. Yes, the media is in the intelligence business. For example, there was a direct connection between the CIA and Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe.
There is, however, a difference between Western media and that of Russia and China. In the West, intelligence generated by reporters and correspondents is open-source intelligence (OSINT). Policymakers and the public read the same newspaper reports. America’s adversaries use their correspondents at RT and CGTN as agents. With the collapse of journalism’s business model and the Trump assault on state-sponsored media, we have been steadily losing the information war.
Today, we have chosen to fight Iran with one arm tied behind our back and our tongue half‑cut out. The missiles and carrier groups are still there. The words, and the institutions that once carried them over borders and into people’s living rooms, are not gone, but they’re not what they could have been had Trump and Lake not taken a wrecking ball to these venerable institutions. That is America’s self‑inflicted wound. In Tehran, Iranians are already paying the price. And so are we.
