US-Iran conflict: A spectacular military win, another information war loss

US President Donald Trump called the pinpoint precision bombing of three nuclear facilities in Iran on June 21 “a spectacular military success” and there is no doubt that it was a stunning display of American military might. Hard power without equal.

But Operation Midnight Hammer, as the Pentagon termed it, also served as a reminder that under Trump, the United States pays little attention to soft power, the ability to influence other countries through attraction and persuasion. In the international information war waged around the world, Trump’s America tends to fare badly.

That was highlighted again in the aftermath of the strike on the Iranian facilities with 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs never before used in war. No other country has a bomb that can penetrate 250 feet of solid rock.

Four days after the strikes on nuclear enrichment facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, one of the oldest and best-known instruments of US soft power, the Voice of America, was the subject of heated discussion in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives.

Kari Lake, the top advisor of the US Agency for Global Media, which includes the Voice of America, was called to defend her decision to abolish the broadcaster. Founded in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda, it grew into a multi-media operation broadcasting in almost 50 languages and claiming a weekly global audience of more than 350 million people.

Trump ordered VOA dismantled when he began his second term. By the time of the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, around 85 per cent of the workforce had been fired. They included almost all journalists running the Persian-language service.

If ever independent news were important for Iranians, it was when Israel and Iran began exchanging missile strikes, one of which hit the Iranian State TV and Radio Station at the moment a chador-clad anchor began her programme and had to run out of the studio seconds before the lights went out.

In Washington, even ardent critics of VOA realised the importance of news unfiltered by Iranian propaganda. The government hastily ordered the Farsi-speaking staff to return to work from “administrative leave.”

The Persian service had been shut down by an executive order Trump issued on March 15. The abrupt dismissal of the staff prompted various lawsuits.

Though the need to recall the fired staff spoke volumes of the administration’s inept handling of the global information war, Kari Lake, on behalf of her boss, kept insisting that VOA must go.

“Some say it’s the Voice of anti-America,” she told the hearing, a reference to oft-repeated charges that the broadcaster’s staffers were “left-wing radicals.” Lake added: “Hopefully, we can root out the Russian, Chinese, Iranian propaganda that has been prevalent on our airwaves at VOA and we are going to work to do that.”

Lake suggested that the purpose of the broadcaster is “to promote President Trump’s message to people around the world. She sharply criticised VOA coverage of Trump in the run-up to the 2024 elections and accused the organisation of pro-Chinese Communist Party propaganda.

Democrats on the committee interpreted her remarks as evidence she was on a mission to turn VOA into an international mouthpiece for President Trump.

America’s adversaries around the world have had fulsome praise for the administration’s apparent mission to dismantle its global influence and information structure, chief of all the media that, in the words of the New York Times media analyst Tiffany Hsu “helped market the United States as the world’s moral and cultural authority.”

America’s competitors in the influence market were overjoyed by VOA’s demise. Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, the Kremlin-backed news network, said “this is a holiday for me and my colleagues.” Praise also came from China. Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of Global Times, a Chinese government outlet, commented that dismantling VOA was “really gratifying.”

Both China and Russia are now spending more money and effort on the information war that runs parallel to hard power moves. In Trump’s first term, attempts to deeply cut budgets for international development and diplomacy failed to pass Congress.

The main reason: opposition from the then leaders of the Armed Forces, who argued that military might alone could not solve America’s conflicts and should be complemented by soft power. The present top leaders of the Pentagon are inclined to bow to the president’s wishes.

Across the Atlantic, the British government is going into the opposite direction from the Americans. The British Broadcasting Service (BBC) is held in high esteem and members of the parliament recently clamoured for more funding for a network with a sterling reputation and followers around the world.

“The BBC plays an indispensable role in the fight against misinformation,’ the meeting was told, with speakers noting that “where services have been cut, we have seen other countries rush in to fill the space.”

Perhaps the most devastating criticism of the Trump administration’s failure to appreciate the importance of its international media assets has come from Jamie Sheah, a British former NATO official.

“The soft power suicide of the U.S. will be incomprehensible for future historians who will be dumbfounded in their attempts to explain why the global leader voluntarily wrecked one of its greatest national assets.”