As long heard around the world, the (lower-case) voice of America at its best used to sound compelling, authentic, attractive and even stirring, at times vibrating enough soft power to tumble the walls of modern-day Jerichos.

That was already true when the voice spoke German, as it did during the very first broadcast of the (upper-case) Voice of America, in February 1942.

“Today, and daily from now, we shall speak to you about America and the war,” the voice told the Germans secretly tuning in on short-wave radio. “The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.”

Journalists being free to report — and then actually reporting — the truth whether it suited their own government or not: That alone came as a shocking alternative to people in Nazi Germany, and later the Soviet bloc and other places oppressed by dictators, terrorists, juntas or strongmen.

Funded by American taxpayers via the U.S. government, Voice of America was independent in law and practice; it provided not propaganda but news.

And fun — so much of it, for what could be more American than that? An entire generation of Asians, Africans, Europeans and others tuned in for Willis Conover to hear not lectures on checks and balances but his Jazz Hour. Another generation relaxed and unwound to the smooth, upbeat cadence of Casey Kasem as he presented his American Top 40 hits. Yet others dialed in just to learn English, perhaps dreaming of visiting or emigrating to the U.S. one day.

In all those ways, Voice of America and its younger sisters, including Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, were force multipliers of American diplomacy. That’s something they had in common with the United States Agency for International Development, which showed up in its many guises wherever people were in danger or need, from hunger, disease, earthquakes or floods. The costs of all these programs were modest but quantifiable. The benefits in goodwill and soft power were vast but unquantifiable.

President Donald Trump and his MAGA fans have never understood those benefits, nor ever tried. Right out of the gates in his second term, Trump and his henchman Elon Musk took a wrecking ball to USAID, spinning febrile conspiracy theories about waste and abuse. Then they went after the broadcasters, whom they viewed as members of the woke opposition to be censored or subdued. Trump signed an executive order to defund and gut what he called “The Voice of Radical America.” “It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves,” Musk chimed in.

Their rampages are already being felt around the world. A huge earthquake struck Myanmar the other day, the first major disaster since Trump axed almost all foreign and humanitarian aid. In the past, “the first group that we call and the first group that we expect to arrive” would be American search-and-rescue teams and other lifesavers, says Bob Kitchen at the International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization. This time, the Americans were mostly no-shows, he says, and the effects were “immediate, obvious and a crying shame.”

America has gone missing from the airwaves too. Funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs the Voice of America, RFE/RL and the other programs in the stable, is mandated by Congress. The Trump administration has treated that as a technicality, defying a court order and cutting off almost all money.

The journalists at VoA have been put on indefinite leave. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has furloughed its staff. In place of uncensored news, listeners now hear music on autopilot or static. The Trump administration also switched off the satellite that used to beam news into Russia, whose propaganda RFE/RL was set up to counter.

All this is cause for “celebration” and “an awesome decision by Trump,” exulted Margarita Simonyan. She’s the editor of RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin’s analog to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. As American voices and stories fall silent from Europe to Africa, the Russians and Chinese are eagerly amplifying theirs. They’re even more enthusiastic that the former bastion of liberty, the U.S., is voluntarily veering from principles such as freedom of the press and respect for truth. Suddenly, RT, Sputnik and the rest no longer seem Orwellian but in vogue.

Many Americans, meanwhile, are mourning the silencing of their national voices abroad. Not Trump’s MAGA base, for the most part. Part of America First is a cultivated ignorance about, or disdain for, America-as-viewed-from-outside. After all, that’s the vantage of cosmopolitans and “globalists,” isn’t it? In that way, die-hard Trumpists are like fish in the MAGA pond who don’t know that there is air above and earth below.

One cost of letting America’s voice fall silent is the loss of a slow but effective vector to win hearts and minds abroad, the kind of unofficial diplomacy that can, over time, eat through Iron Curtains, Berlin Walls and other barriers between humankind, making the U.S. and its friends safer and freer. An even worse tragedy is the forfeiture of the ideals that once made America’s voice what it was.

That self-betrayal is what happens when an American president sounds more like his counterparts in Budapest or Ankara, Beijing or Moscow; when he declares trade wars on allies or threatens them with annexation; when he rejects the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, unless they’re white Afrikaners; when he aims to build a world safe not for democracy but for strongmen like him and their propaganda. Demagogues speak, just as patriots do, and America must now choose its true voice, or fall silent.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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