Early in 1990, about three months after the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe’s communist regimes imploded, I had the opportunity to travel through Hungary, Romania, and what was then still a unified Czechoslovakia. Many of the people I met during that trip told me what it had been like to live in a dictatorship where expressing criticism of the government could lead to persecution, imprisonment, or worse.

In Bucharest, one family showed me the hidden shelf in a closet where they kept the short-wave radio on which each evening they would listen to Radio Free Europe — the US government media outlet that beamed news to listeners in Eastern European countries, along with programs on religion, science, Western music, and literature banned under communism. Those American broadcasts, a rare source of uncensored information to ordinary men and women trapped behind the Iron Curtain, helped keep democratic hopes alive during the most frigid stretches of the Cold War.

A dozen years later, during a stay in Cuba, I visited Gisela Delgado and her husband Hector Palacios, courageous opponents of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship whose dissent took the form of a tiny private lending library stocked with smuggled-in books about freedom, democracy, and anticommunist resistance. At one point Delgado interrupted our conversation to gesture toward the open window. “Listen,” she said. “Do you hear?”

From two or three neighboring apartments came the notes of some tune I didn’t know. “That’s the theme music of the evening program on Radio Martí,” she told me. She was referring to the Miami-based broadcast service created to supply Cubans with news and commentary unimpeded by Castro’s censors.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Martí, as well as Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Voice of America — all overseen by the US Agency for Global Media, or USAGM — were created by Congress as a vehicle for “soft diplomacy,” a way to promote freedom of speech and independent journalism for the benefit of people in countries dominated by authoritarians. For countless listeners trapped in repressive societies, the radio services have been an inestimably precious lifeline. But over the weekend they became the latest victims of President Trump’s scorched-earth campaigns to eviscerate the federal bureaucracy and to penalize media outlets that don’t reflect the MAGA worldview.

On Friday night, Trump signed an executive order cutting off funding for USAGM and ordering its operations to cease “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” On Saturday, a follow-up statement attacked Voice of America as a hotbed of “radical propaganda.” According to VOA director Michael Abramowitz, more than 1,300 journalists, producers, and support staff have been placed on administrative leave.

It would be hard to overstate how important the radio services were to the West’s victory in the Cold War.

Václav Havel, the playwright, poet, and dissident who became Czechoslovakia’s first democratically elected president after the fall of communism, used to say that he learned about the United States from the Voice of America — and about his own country through Radio Free Europe. Lech Walesa, the charismatic electrician and trade union activist who led the struggle to topple communist rule in Poland, was once asked what Radio Free Europe had meant to the triumph of Polish democracy. He answered: “Would there be an earth without the sun?”

There have always been critiques of the journalism produced by VOA and the other broadcasters. As far back as 1980, for example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lamented that the radio stations were “constantly trying not to arouse the anger of the Soviet leadership.”

More commonly, though, hostility toward the media outlets has come from totalitarian regimes, which bitterly resent programming they cannot control and try to suppress it by jamming radio signals and making it illegal to tune in. In the United States, the biggest foes of operations like Voice of America and Radio Martí tended to be Democrats, who regarded them as impediments to US-Soviet détente or to normalizing relations with Havana. Ironic, then, that the latest assault on the freedom broadcasters should come from the Republican Trump administration.

The political labels don’t matter to the despots in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. They excel at disseminating propaganda, disinformation, and lies, and they will gain the most if Trump succeeds in silencing VOA and the other stations. When news of the White House order broke, the Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza — who spent more than two years in prison for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine — tartly observed: “One more champagne bottle opened in the Kremlin. They must be running out by now.”

With each passing week it becomes clearer that the world’s liberal democracies can no longer count on the loyalty or sympathy of America’s highest-ranking officials. Once Radio Martí, Radio Free Asia, and their sister stations have been gutted, what’s next?