MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There are different ways countries can project power around the world. One is with military strength. Another way has been targeted by the Trump administration's budget cuts. NPR's Emily Feng reports on what some of these projects and programs have delivered over the decades.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: After World War II, the U.S. started building what scholars now call soft power tools. Of particular interest was radio.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: From the fuhrer's headquarters, December the 28th...
FENG: A medium so powerful in winning hearts and minds that just a few years earlier, the Nazis subsidized the production of cheap radio sets. And after the defeat of the Nazis, the allies, led by the United States, broke up Germany's national radio system into regional broadcasters to limit the power of the microphone. But the U.S. simultaneously invested in building that power for itself.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Romanian).
FENG: In the 1950s, U.S. Congress authorized Radio Free Europe in Germany and later Radio Liberty to start beaming shortwave news reports into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, including this broadcast in Romanian.
RONALD LINDEN: It was absolutely a vital source of information to know what was going on in their own country.
FENG: This is Ronald Linden. He was a former research director at Radio Free Europe in 1989. From there, he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall that year. And then...
LINDEN: Bang, down goes Czechoslovakia. And then they said, well, it'll never happen in East Germany - bang, one after another, the regimes fell.
FENG: In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe chronicled the rise of the European Union and democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. But in March, President Trump ordered the agency which oversees the outlet and other state outlets dismantled, though Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is challenging its funding freeze in court. Kari Lake, Trump's appointee to head that agency, has said Radio for Europe is being infiltrated by, quote, "spies and terrorist sympathizers putting out biased coverage." Lake has defended the administration's dismantling of what she calls a rotten agency in the press, including in a March interview with Newsmax.
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KARI LAKE: The rot is so bad. It's like having a rotten fish and trying to find a little portion you can eat. It's unsalvageable right now, and so I agree with President Trump. Let's scale this thing down to the bare-bones minimum.
FENG: Though it's not clear whether the broadcasters will be dismantled entirely or retooled. Her agency did not respond to a request for comment. The federal cost cutting has also hit a bevy of research centers and scholarships, like the Fulbright, and think tanks like the Wilson Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace, which bolster the U.S.'s foreign policy expertise. They are part of what makes the U.S. an intellectual powerhouse the world over. Here's Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University, speaking about the Wilson Center's archives, which are now at risk.
NICOLE HEMMER: The Cold War was kind of the foundational geopolitical reality for the United States for 40 years. And so these archives don't just help us understand the world, but they help us better understand our own history here in the United States.
FENG: And, in turn, the U.S. built a deep pool of foreign leaders and academics who studied in the U.S. or grew up listening to American broadcasts.
DEREK MITCHELL: That's the problem with the idea of soft power. It's very hard to quantify, but it was very real.
FENG: This is Derek Mitchell. When he was the U.S. ambassador to Myanmar, he frequently encountered foreign officials and scholars who had done programs with the U.S. Institute of Peace or received U.S. grants.
MITCHELL: The best and brightest. And they had this image and admiration of the United States.
FENG: An admiration, Mitchell said, that led them to side with America despite all of its flaws. Now he fears not only will the U.S. understand less about the world, but other countries will be less understanding of the U.S.
Emily Feng, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF DISASTERPEACE'S "PANACEA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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