Trump renounces the international influence of soft power

In the 1930s, Iowa City went all in on the literary game in its fight to stand out in the vast national imaginary. And so it was that its writers’ workshop became a legendary place in American literature and home to greats like Marilynne Robinson and John Cheever. This fame later crossed borders thanks to its international program, which began 58 years ago, inviting foreign authors to spend the fall and write there. There have been 1,625 in total, from 160 countries. Among them, three Nobel Prize winners: Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk, China’s Mo Yan, and, most recently, Korea’s Hang Kang.

At the end of February, the State Department decided to end its nearly $1 million grant to a program that helped Iowa City achieve UNESCO City of Literature status. “The Trump administration doesn’t think we’re America First enough,” lamented Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program (IWP) for 25 years, in a downtown café three weeks ago. “It’s an insignificant loss in a sea of more significant cuts, but it seems to me to indicate that Trump has decided to give up on cultural diplomacy and soft power, or, as [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton called it, smart power.”

Merrill was referring to the term coined in the 1990s by Harvard professor Joseph Nye to describe the type of power that complements military and economic power and which the U.S. has wielded — along with hard power, which has included invasions, support for coups and funding guerrillas — since the end of World War II. The ability to influence foreign countries and win over people through the tools of seduction.

A nation’s soft power is based on its culture, its values, and its policies, as long as others consider them legitimate, Nye wrote a couple of weeks ago in a Financial Times article whose headline reached the same conclusion as Merrill. According to him, Trump has “a truncated view of power, limited to coercion and transactions. How else can one explain his bullying of Denmark over Greenland, his threats to Panama, which outrage Latin America, or his siding with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, which weakens seven decades of NATO alliance — not to mention his dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that John F. Kennedy created? All undercut American soft power.”

Nye, who had already warned that something like this could happen in an interview with this newspaper prior to the elections, wrote his article before the new administration’s latest blows to the doctrine that he gave a name to: shuttering the Voice of America (VOA) radio station and the announcement of the closure of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a congressionally funded research lab for conflict resolution.

The start of the process to dismantle VOA, which includes the suspension of Radio Free Europe, serving Central and Eastern Europe, and Radio Free Asia, focused on Asia, as well as Martí Noticias, which broadcasts in Cuba, began last Saturday with an email sent by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, to some 1,300 journalists. The email informed them that they were being placed on paid leave until further notice, thus ending 80 years of reporting (and exerting influence) in countries, many of them authoritarian, where reliable sources of information are scarce. Authorities in Russia, China, and Iran, eager to fill VOA’s gap, have welcomed Trump’s decision to shut down an outlet founded in 1942 to spread democratic ideas in Nazi Germany.

In conversations this week with some of those workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, they described practices similar to those suffered by tens of thousands of employees fired by DOGE: emails sent on a day when there was no way to react, accounts suddenly deactivated, personal information lost, and being barred from entering the building that houses the media outlet in Washington.

One of them complained about the “Kafkaesque” nature of the fact that, even if he receives a job offer, he won’t be able to accept it because, technically, he isn’t fired and doesn’t know who to contact in order to get properly fired. Another said she saw only one option: “Quit journalism.” On Friday, a group of them, along with Reporters Without Borders, filed a lawsuit against the government and against Kari Lake, the failed Republican Senate candidate whom Trump chose to head VOA.

“Rotten fish”

In an interview with the right-wing outlet Newsmax earlier this week, Lake described the VOA as “like having a rotten fish and trying to find a portion that you can eat.” In a post on social media platform X, she later elaborated on how VOA is “a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer — a national security risk for this nation — and irretrievably broken.”

The White House published a text to go with the shutdown decree, which mainstream U.S. media have framed as part of Trump’s campaign to undermine the freedom of the press that is critical of him. Titled The Voice of Radical America, it details reasons for its dismantling, such as the publication after George Floyd’s murder of an article entitled What Is ‘White Privilege’ and Whom Does It Help? or the 2019 broadcast of a program about transgender migrants seeking asylum in the United States.

While VOA, which had an enviable budget of $267.5 million, is designed to be shielded from the intervention of whoever is in the White House at any given time, its current tenant hasn’t even attempted to intervene in its editorial line to spread the MAGA ideology around the world. Perhaps that is because he relies on other media, such as X, a platform owned by Elon Musk, or in further evidence of his scant interest in the more or less subtle weapons of soft power.

Be that as it may, it hasn’t exactly come as a surprise: Trump already demonstrated this lack of faith with the temporary freeze on funding for graduate studies on Fulbright scholarships, a program created in 1946 to promote exchanges between American and international university graduates, leaving thousands of participants, both American and foreign-born, unsure whether they will be able to complete their academic year. But above all, with the closure, early in his second term, of USAID, which carried out humanitarian aid programs in developing countries and in conflict zones where the United States’ image will be affected for obvious reasons.

There was always a moral justification behind that cooperation, but also other interests, summarized in 2017 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a senator: “I promise you it is going to be a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism and anti-American terrorism if the United States of America is the reason one is even alive today.” As with so many other things involving Trump, Rubio has also changed his mind during this time.

In the “insignificant” case of the International Writing Program, Merrill recalls that the effects will be felt in Iowa City, where “90% of the IWP money was spent in local businesses.” The announcement will also have repercussions for Spanish-language literature: dozens of authors have passed through the IWP, going back to the Chilean writer José Donoso — whose papers are housed at the city’s university — in the 1960s.

One of the latest participants, Mexico’s Brenda Navarro, lamented the news this week, saying it was “devastating in terms of the literary community.” “For Iowa, which is losing part of its richness as a city of literature, and also on a personal level,” she noted. “For me,” Navarro confessed: “the IWP represented a paradigm shift in my understanding of literary creation around the world, since you find yourself in a space where, in addition to having time to write, you hear about the challenges and successes that exist around literature, [and] you generate shared knowledge and networks that last a lifetime.”

It’s clear that in Trump’s America, those relationships, which contributed to intangibles like the dissemination of the American narrative abroad, no longer count as much. A new era of cultural diplomacy has begun. And perhaps nothing better symbolizes this new dawn than a visit to the Voice of America website, whose front page is still, to dystopian effect, frozen in the news from a couple of Saturdays ago. Its journalists didn’t even have time to publish a final news report about their own end.

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