Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and U.S. Strategic Interests in Central Asia

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The presence of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Central Asia has been foundational to advancing United States strategic interests in three critical ways. First, the broadcasters served as the primary conduit for articulating Washington’s vision for U.S.-Central Asia relations. Second, they offered effective counters to disinformation and misinformation. Third and finally, RFE/RL and VOA were wellsprings of open-source intelligence and, in this capacity, immeasurably improved U.S. bilateral and multilateral foreign policy in the region. This memo explores their contributions in these three domains, as well as how U.S. strategic interests in Central Asia may be affected should President Donald Trump fulfill his plan to eliminate the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the parent organization of VOA and RFE/RL.

Conveying U.S. Policy

United States administrations have multiple channels for speaking to foreign populations. They can address them directly. For example, President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, during her briefing on January 6, 2022, addressed the intervention by the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to quell protests in Kazakhstan: “The world will, of course, be watching for any violation of human rights and actions that may lay the predicate for the seizure of Kazakh institutions, and we call on the CSTO collective peacekeeping forces and law enforcement to uphold international human rights obligations in order to support a peaceful resolution.” For months, the Biden administration had been documenting the Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s eastern border. This seemed to mark another case of Russia deploying military forces in the post-Soviet space, and the Biden administration wished to convey its commitment to Kazakhstan’s sovereignty just as Washington had repeatedly articulated its commitment to Ukraine’s.

Closer to its intended audience, Washington can speak through its embassies and consulates to share its concerns, vision, and values. Addressing the summer 2022 protests in the United States, U.S. Ambassador to Uzbekistan Daniel Rosenblum stated in June 2020:

George Floyd’s death was a grave tragedy… The massive demonstrations we have seen over the past two weeks show how deeply this event has affected people in the United States and in other countries around the world. Peaceful protests illustrate the importance of free speech and free assembly, which provide citizens a means to protest injustice, to demand accountability from their leaders, and to effect the necessary political and policy changes.

While clear articulation of U.S. policy, statements by ambassadors and press secretaries are limited in their reach. Central Asians, like most Americans, receive their news from the media and rarely from U.S. government officials directly. In Central Asia, however, the U.S. government cannot be sure that its statements will be covered—or accurately covered—in the local media. Voice of America and RFE/RL thus serve as critical tools for conveying U.S. policy to Central Asian audiences in Central Asian languages.

In November 2020, Rosenblum reached the Uzbekistani audience through a different medium: Amerika Ovozi, VOA’s Uzbek-language service. In a broadcast titled “Journalists are not the enemy,” VOA journalist Navbahor Imamova highlighted, in Uzbek, Rosenblum’s criticism of the Uzbekistani government’s claims that several independent news outlets had engaged in “unprofessional activities.” Rosenblum, Imamova explained, believes “Uzbekistan has embarked on reforms with lofty goals in mind, and pressure on the media is not in line with that direction.”

Measuring the broadcasters’ in-country reach is challenging. The local-language affiliates of VOA and RFE/RL are often blocked in Central Asia. Despite these blocks, the subscriber base is considerable. As of September 2025, VOA’s Uzbek-language YouTube channel, Amerika Ovozi, had over 800,000 subscribers, while Ozodlik Radiosi, RFE’s Uzbek-language YouTube channel, had 3.35 million subscribers. RFE’s Kazakh-, Kyrgyz-, and Tajik-language subscribers, as the table below illustrates, are also considerable.

Figure 1: Total subscribers of local-language RFE/RL YouTube channels

Source: YouTube

While the broadcasters are not mouthpieces of the U.S. government in Central Asia or elsewhere—indeed, in June 2025, Kari Lake, Trump’s senior advisor for USAGM, cited VOA and RFE/RL stories sympathetic to “illegal aliens” as justification for shuttering them—they are Washington’s most effective and far-reaching platforms for conveying its policy to regional audiences.

Countering Disinformation

The broadcasters’ considerable audience among Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik, and Turkmen speakers make RFE/RL and VOA effective tools for countering state and nonstate actors who deliberately seek to distort Washington’s vision and message. Russia-origin disinformation is widespread across Central Asia and appears both in Kremlin mouthpieces like Sputnik and Channel One (Pervyy kanal), as well as in local media outlets that rebroadcast, reprint, and repackage Russian disinformation. Exemplary of this disinformation are Kremlin-backed stories that the U.S. and its allies are using terrorism, along with gay and transgender rights, to advance Western strategic interests in Russia and Central Asia.

Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s FSB, opined on Russian television that the deadly March 2024 terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, a concert venue in Moscow, “was prepared by both the Islamist radicals themselves and was facilitated by Western special services.” Bortnikov’s comments, which many Central Asians could watch and rewatch on local broadcasts of Channel One, were echoed by Russia’s Central Asia Sputnik outlets and by local publications like Vecherniy Dushanbe. “International terrorism,” columnist Esen Usubaliev explains in Sputnik Kyrgyzstan, “will always be one of the main U.S. instruments Washington uses to exert power abroad.”

The other instrument the U.S. purportedly uses is LGBTQ+ rights, which it supposedly champions to undermine the norms and politics of Eurasian societies. Sergei Shoigu, formerly defense minister and currently secretary of Russia’s Security Council, explained during a February 2025 visit to Astana that the goal of USAID was to pursue “all the colors of the rainbow, both in the sense of LGBTQ+ and in the sense of color revolutions.” Shoigu reflected that it was regrettable that too many countries came to this realization only after USAID’s “propaganda” had inflicted “irreversible harm” on Eurasian countries.  

The Kazakhstani news site Orda.kz, covering an August 2024 public hearing on gay and transgender “propaganda” convened by the Ministry of Culture and Information, quoted an activist advancing a similar logic: “Kazakhstan will be torn to pieces by the West… because of LGBT, instead of 20 million people, Kazakhstan’s population will be 10-15 million… this is a question of national security!” Meanwhile, the Kyrgyzstani daily Vecherniy Bishkek reprinted an article, first published by the Russia-backed regional news site Vostochnyy Ekspress 24, on how children’s puppet theater can protect the next generation from the “systemic LGBT attack on the traditional cultural underpinnings of [Eurasian] society.” 

Refuting conspiracy-theory-based disinformation is difficult. Critical to it, media scholars have found, is penetrating the “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” that reinforce anti-American disinformation narratives, which, lamentably, are widespread in Central Asia. Fact-based reporting in local languages, as RFE/RL and VOA have done in Central Asia, has been Washington’s most effective instrument for countering these narratives.

Following attacks on LGBTQ+ activists in Tashkent, for example, VOA’s Uzbek-language service, Amerika Ovozi, ran an article stressing the brutality of the violence and questioning politicians’ statements that gay and transgender rights “have nothing to do with human rights.” Radio Azattyk, in a 2021 interview with author Oljobai Shakir, encouraged its subscribers to consider LGBTQ+ issues within the Kyrgyzstani context: Father to a transgender son, Shakir had just completed a novel showcasing the daily challenges LGBTQ+ persons face in Kyrgyzstan.

One might fault the broadcasters for not more forcefully challenging disinformation narratives. For example, the day following Bortnikov’s charge that the Crocus City Hall attack “was facilitated by Western special services,” RFE/RL’s Tajik service, Radio Ozodi, rather than directly refuting this bit of Kremlin disinformation, carried its interviews with family members of the attackers. This was the first of several Ozodiinvestigations into the radicalization of a small subset of Tajik men working abroad. As with their attempts to refute narratives that the U.S. is promoting LGBTQ+ rights to destabilize Central Asian society, so too here the broadcasters work to break through disinformation bubbles by contextualizing events within relatable, lived experiences of Central Asians.

Providing Open-Source Intelligence

Much of what we know about the processes that drive such rare but deadly cases of terrorism—be it the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow or the self-radicalization of the Boston bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers—is thanks to rigorous investigations and reporting by VOA and RFE/RL journalists. More broadly, the local staff regularly covered topics related critical U.S. national interests. In the decade following the September 11 attacks, the U.S. established sizeable military command and logistic centers in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The broadcasters’ reporting on the sometimes-strained relations between the Americans and the host communities and governments provided valuable insights into the sustainability of the U.S. military presence in Central Asia. VOA and RFE/RL investigations into relokanty, Russians who have fled to Central Asia to avoid being enlisted to fight in the war of aggression against Ukraine, point to the limits of the Kremlin’s years-long mobilization campaign. Finally, their vast reporting on the political economy of Central Asian states—both the promise and shortcomings—has, for more than three decades, informed Washington’s bilateral and multilateral economic and geopolitical polices toward the region.

Prior to the Trump administration’s staff cuts at the broadcasters, RFE/RL’s 23 bureaus were staffed by over 1,300 journalists, and VOA had approximately 1,000 workers on staff. While the broadcasters do not provide data on country-level staffing, VOA and RFE/RL indisputably were Washington’s most robust and far-reaching sources of open-source intelligence on Central Asia. In addition, the presence of outlets broadcasting to all five Central Asian states provided considerable “externalities” for Central Asian media broadly: The bureaus, backed by Washington’s considerable influence, worked tirelessly to protect Central Asian reporters, including colleagues at other media outlets dealing with repression or the threat of repression from state and nonstate actors. The shuttering of the broadcasters will have a chilling effect on Central Asian media that extends far beyond VOA and RFE/RL.

Conclusion

In her June 2025 testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lake, USAGM senior advisor, presented cases of “mismanagement,” “poor security practices,” and “biased coverage” at VOA and RFE/RL. Such allegations, along with her proposal to “wipe that slate clean and start over,” deserve attention and immediate rebuttal.

The VOA and RFE/RL network of professional journalists, as well as the institutions’ embeddedness into local media environments across the globe and their country audiences (in Central Asia alone reaching the multiple millions), has taken decades to build. If Trump follows through on the proposal to eliminate USAGM, his administration and others for the foreseeable future will struggle to restore VOA and RFE/RL’s audience and reporting capacity. The bottom line is that the U.S. government’s ability to counter anti-American disinformation narratives will diminish; trusted platforms for conveying Washington’s vision to global audiences in local languages will disappear; and the U.S. government’s best source of reliable open-source intelligence will be lost.

Encouragingly, the Trump administration has demonstrated flexibility in implementing its policy of downsizing. In different contexts, it has sought to restaff units within the Department of Energy and the Centers for Disease Control once the critical role these units was eventually recognized. Doing the same with USAGM would be in line with the Trump administration’s objective of addressing what it claims are empirically demonstratable problems in the broadcasters’ operations while securing the essential role of VOA and RFE/RL in advancing U.S. strategic interests.  

Eric McGlinchey is an associate professor of politics and government at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. McGlinchey is the author of Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia (2011). His current book project, Broadcasting US Foreign Policy in Eurasia, explores VOA and RFE/RL promotion of U.S. strategic interests, media freedoms, civil society, and human rights in Central Asia.

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