Trump is taking a hammer to traditional pillars of soft power

The argument for international aid is in part a moral one, but it’s also been about U.S. interests. As then-senator Marco Rubio put it in 2017: “I promise you it’s going to be a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism, anti-American terrorism if the United States of America was the reason why they’re even alive today.”

Now, as secretary of state, Rubio serves under a president who is deeply skeptical of the idea of international aid. “We’re giving billions and billions of dollars to countries that hate us,” President Trump said in a speech last month. His administration shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development. A federal judge said this week that move violated the constitution. What’s left of the agency has been folded into the State Department.

Trump has also moved to gut government-funded, editorially independent broadcasters like Voice of America, and attempted to effectively eliminate the congressionally-funded think tank the U.S. Institute of Peace.

This sort of soft power has been a pillar of American foreign policy. Is the Trump administration walking away from it?

We talk to former Democratic congressman and former secretary of agriculture, Dan Glickman, who sponsored the legislation that created the USIP.

And NPR’s Emily Feng reports on the legacy of Voice of America in China.

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(Image credit: Kayla Bartkowski)