That VOA has had its day will not be cause for lament

Having signed an executive order in March this year that effectively called for the dismantling of the Voice of America, US President Donald Trump has once again urged Congress to kill the news agency, which he derided as a mouthpiece for the Democrats.

The Voice of America was launched in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, and later on, after World War II, it functioned as a mouthpiece of the US government, disseminating "US values" and its ideologies to the world, especially to socialist countries.

To be exact, throughout the Cold War and beyond, the VOA served as a tool of the US' soft power, aiming to penetrate into countries the US considered to be its rivals. Its remit was to brainwash people in those countries of the appeal of Western values and ideologies such as "freedom" and "democracy" in the hope of establishing a pernicious influence with the intention of effecting changes in them desirable to the US.

Whatever motivations are behind the Trump administration's bid to shut down the VOA as well as similar news agencies such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, these propaganda mouthpieces of the US government have left dirty imprints on history. With their designed lack of objectivity and balanced attitude in their reporting, they were anything but media organizations serving instead as instruments of destabilization.

With the rapid development of telecommunications and digital technology, and the rise of the mobile internet in particular, international communication is totally different from what it was, enabling the viral dissemination of messaging.

Since new media channels have become the US' preferred medium of choice for the dissemination of US propaganda, the writing has been on the wall for the VOA and other legacy outlets. For the cost-benefit-conscious US administration, funding such a relic of the past is considered dollars down the drain.

But a more fundamental observation to make is that the VOA and its sister organizations have no justification to exist at all given their raison d'etre is interference in the internal affairs of other countries.

And in today's world, exchanges between different cultures — not the imposition of one on another — is the prevailing trend of international communication. While the rapid development of social media has produced an overabundance of fake news and misinformation, it has also made it possible for people from different cultures and different countries to communicate with each other directly, enabling a grassroots pushback against the distortions of US political messaging.

That Chinese social networking and commerce app Xiaohongshu gained an influx of quite a large number of new users from the US and other parts of the world due to the anticipated shutdown of TikTok by the US government suggests that communication between people from different cultures transcends borders nowadays, allowing the truth to debunk fictions.

In today's increasingly globalized world, common development has become a pursuit of humanity. In the current world order, exchanges between different cultures should prevail over conflicts, mutual learning among different cultures should prevail over confrontation and accommodation between different cultures should prevail over cultural superiority.

In other words, human civilization has entered a phase different from what it was during the Cold War. Peace and development are the overarching themes of the times with globalized industry and supply chains sustaining a world order that can accommodate all cultures.

Globalization has changed almost every aspect of the world landscape in terms of social and economic development. The global order has never been so pluralistic. After the confrontation between the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union and the capitalist camp led by the US, a multipolar world is emerging.

In a world in which all countries need to support each other and pool their respective wisdom and resources to address the common challenges such as climate change that humanity faces, it is no exaggeration to say that such a "news outlet" as the VOA is an anachronism.