Yesterday, Cambodia’s pugnacious former Prime Minister Hun Sen took to Facebook to express his support and appreciation for U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to cut off federal funding to U.S.-funded broadcasters including Radio Free Asia (RFA).
In a post accompanied by photos of himself with Trump taken at an ASEAN summit in the Philippines in 2017, he praised the U.S. president “for having the courage to lead the world to combat fake news, starting with U.S. government-funded news networks.”
“This is a major contribution to eliminating fake news, disinformation, lies, distortions, incitement, and chaos around the world,” Hun Sen wrote.
On March 14, Trump issued an executive order listing the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds media outlets including RFA and Voice of America (VOA), as among “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has determined are unnecessary.” The White House said that the cuts would ensure “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.” Elon Musk, who is leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, has previously written of U.S.-funded media organizations: “It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
The shutdown of these outlets, which also include RFE/RL, a broadcaster serving Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, has been widely condemned by journalists and human rights activists, including in Cambodia. For years, RFA and VOA have reported in depth on a wide range of corruption and human rights issues in the country, in both Khmer and English.
Their importance has only increased over the past decade as Hun Sen and his successor, his eldest son Hun Manet, have taken steps to eliminate adversarial independent journalism within the country. In September 2017, the government forced the closure of the Cambodia Daily, one of two foreign-owned newspapers that was established under the auspices of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in 1992-93. The second of these papers, the Phnom Penh Post, was sold under duress to government-friendly Malaysian investors in May 2018. VOD English, which filled the vacuum left by these losses, was itself shut down in February 2023.
While RFA was forced to shut down its bureau in Phnom Penh in September 2017, and was blocked from being accessed within Cambodia in July 2023, it and VOA continued to report on the country from their newsrooms in Washington, D.C.
Hun Sen’s response reflects the broader enthusiasm of the Asian governments that have long opposed U.S. democracy promotion efforts. In a post on X yesterday, a major Myanmar military propaganda account opined that the shutdown of VOA and RFA would end “years of divisive foreign propaganda that fueled unrest and weakened national unity.” It added, “Ending their influence paves the way for stability, cohesion, and stronger domestic media in Myanmar.”
It is no surprise that this account was also giddy in its response to Trump’s effective shutdown on USAID, saying that it would undercut exile media organizations, “politicians who claim to be refugees,” and “the so-called democratic terrorist revolution” challenging its hold on power.
The effusive response extended also to China, where China’s state-backed Global Times published an editorial that described VOA, with evident relish, as “a lie factory.”
“The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag,” it stated.
All of these responses reflect the curious way in which the Trump administration, in seeking to haul down institutions that it views as bastions of left-wing “radicalism,” has deprived the U.S. of many of the institutions that buttress its power and influence around the globe. (The actual political Left has tended to view USAID and media outlets like VOA, as well as democracy promotion organizations such as the National Democratic Institute, as appendages of American imperial power and has opposed them on these grounds.)
At this stage, it remains unclear whether these institutions are simply collateral damage in the administration’s war on the federal bureaucracy and the sprawling network of liberal NGOs supported by federal funds, or part of a conscious attempt to forge a new international order based around the delineation of spheres of influence between the U.S., China, and Russia. Certainly, if the administration wishes to follow a policy of pressuring and containing China, as the Biden administration did, the decision to shut down RFA and VOA, which did voluminous reporting on Chinese human rights abuses (particularly against the Uyghurs of the Xinjiang region) would seem counterproductive.
In any event, the longer that this assault on the institutions of U.S. influence persists, the greater the likelihood that the administration has in mind something closer to the second, darker scenario.
