Adversaries eager to pick up 'soft power' megaphone the U.S. dropped

The United States was a pioneer of global message management, says The New York Times.

But the Trump administration has gutted the agency overseeing government-funded media outlets like the Voice of America and the Radio Free stations, which reached hundreds of millions of people internationally each week.

And now, many global powers see a better chance to “wage friendship,” as one researcher puts it, without competition from the United States.

For example, Sputnik, a Kremlin-backed media outlet, opened an office in Ethiopia in February and says it’s planning more in South Africa and maybe Tanzania, according to the Times. And Turkey’s national public broadcaster, TRT, which delivers online news in dozens of languages, started a broadcast channel in Somalia this spring.

“The soft power suicide of the U.S. will be incomprehensible to future historians who will be dumbfounded in their attempts to explain why the global leader voluntarily wrecked one of its greatest national assets,” wrote Jamie Shea, a British former official at NATO and current senior fellow at Friends of Europe, a think tank.