When President Trump announced Friday that the United States would continue to work on a long-term project to build a secret next-generation fighter jet, the message to China was clear: The U.S. plans to spend tens of thousands of dollars over the next decade, which could be more time in the coming decade, to curb Beijing’s ability to occupy the Pacific in Beijing.
But on Earth, reality is very different.
When the Ministry of Efficiency roars through government agencies across the country, its targets include some of the organizations that Beijing is most concerned about, or actively seeks subversion. And, like so many things about Elon Musk's doe has been dismembered, there is no published research on the costs and benefits of losing these abilities, nor how to change characters (a role as important as a manned warrior).
On the list of capabilities in life support is Free Radio Asia, a 29-year-old nonprofit that estimates its news broadcasts weekly in Asia, from China to Myanmar, and throughout the United States have struggled to boycott the Pacific Islands of China’s narrative about the world. On Friday, it tried to stay in the air as Trump officials returned the move to the U.S. government-backed media.
In the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the internal think tank net assessment office. The annual budget spent by the Pentagon each year takes up a few seconds of budget, and the office tries to move forward in the coming year or two, such as new capabilities of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons and hidden vulnerabilities to military contractor supply chains.
It's a respected institution, and last week's editorial for The Wall Street Journal was “The Office that Wins the Cold War.” In a statement, Mr. Heggss said it would “align with the department’s strategic priorities” in some unspecified way, although its value is a challenge to these priorities.
At the Department of Homeland Security, a series of cyber preparations have been stripped of when Chinese-backed hackers have succeeded at any time in recent memory.
At least temporarily disbanded is the Cybersecurity Review Board created on the National Transportation Safety Commission model, which reviews aircraft accidents and tries to draw lessons learned. The Cybersecurity Commission has just begun to demonstrate how Chinese intelligence is bored within the largest U.S. telecom companies, including the system used by the Justice Department to monitor its “legitimate interception” system that would eavesdrop on people suspected of committing crimes or spies, including Chinese spies.
Now the board of directors has been dissolved. No one in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Bureau can say what happened to one of the most successful penetrations of U.S. cyber, or now responsible for figuring out why U.S. telecom companies have been slapped by China's Department of National Security for more than a year.
The list continues with more evidence that the new government has been effective in demolition of things for the first two months, but painfully explains how their actions fit into their broader strategy.
All of this is celebrated by China. When the voice of the United States was removed and silent, the Global Times (the Chinese Communist Party) wrote: “The so-called freedom beacon VOA has now been discarded like a dirty rag by its own government.”
China is still trying to measure the new government, which is imposing new sanctions on Chinese entities that buy Iranian oil, but is also talking about eliminating the chips and science law. The law not only provides federal funding to start production of advanced semiconductors in the U.S., but also subsidizes China, from batteries to quantum computing, providing billions of dollars in advanced work for a range of key technologies.
“As the Chinese say, it's an ambivalent, we're cutting state power tools while saying we're strengthening competition with Beijing,” said Michael J. Green, CEO of the Centre for American Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. “When we reveal misinformation of human rights or China, it's another form of competition with China. Getting rid of it will only create a vacuum that Beijing will try to fill. We've seen this happen.”
The speed of the demolition shocked many Asian experts a little, knowing that the new aircraft (Mr. Trump said it was an F-47, obviously to pay tribute to his own second term) would contribute to the deterrence of the United States over a decade.
“The U.S. allegations are to stop a war with China without surrendering and to compete effectively in all areas of soft power,” Richard Fontaine, CEO of the New American Security Center and former Republican aide in the Senate, said Friday. “The United States has a range of tools to do this, including humanitarian assistance, development assistance, support for democracy abroad, and work on strategic communication.
“If you go too far, it will be unilateral disarmament in the most important competition in the world,” he warned.
It's hard to find an understandable cut-off theme. Some are based on perceived sins of infidelity, ancient resentment, or even the feeling that state-funded media or think tanks are also inhabited by anti-Trump liberals.
Sometimes, it is especially mysterious. For example, the Net Assessment Office consists primarily of professional civilians or unified military, who are asked to open the box to think: How will China’s prolonged economic downturn affect its leaders’ thinking about Taiwan? When fighting, may combat aircraft (such as the newly announced Jet Warrior) be regularly surpassed by autonomous weapons?
The biggest cuts in Radio Asia have broken many of the biggest stories about Chinese detention camps, with the aim of “reeducating” Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, the most mysterious. Its broadcasts are under attack from Beijing, which goes to great lengths to review reports and broadcast its own narratives, usually on YouTube and X.
The president of Bay Fang Asia Radio Asia, a nonprofit organization, received a $60 million budget from congressionally approved spending, said in an interview that she suspected the organization was targeted specifically.
The Doge and the White House are providing gunfire for Voice of America, which has hundreds of millions of listeners and readers, and Mr. Trump denounced as “Radical Voice of America.” In one of his executive orders, he said he would “make sure taxpayers are no longer trapped in radical propaganda aspects.” (Almost all the voices of 1,300 journalists in the United States are on paid leave.)
“You just need to study how dictators in the region are celebrating our funding,” Ms. Fang said in an interview. “The voices we provide refute their propaganda and shine in the dark corners they would rather stay.” The result was: “We are an important way for the United States to gain trust in these authoritarian countries. Turning off the RFA is not only their loss, but the United States' loss.”
However, winning trust is difficult to quantify. It took years, and the result was not as easy to prove as it was to show a new fighter, and in the case of the new F-47, it was a semi-automatic attack drone flying beside it.
The budget for free Asia is so small that Ms. Fa said she is sure that nonprofits are “collateral losses” because the government tends to donate to US media organizations, which also supports US Voice, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free.
The refund even came before the Senate confirmed that Mr. Trump was in charge of global media agencies, conservative political activist L. Brent Bozell III. He chose Kari Lake, a former journalist who lost the Senate game in Arizona as the new director of the United States, but for now, she is just a “special adviser” as Mr. Trump fired a board member who would have replaced the current leader.
This administration clearly sees “soft energy” as an irrelevant concept. But the lack of it gives Beijing a pleasure to fill it with vacuum.
“It seems self-defeating that while China mounts unrelenting cyberattacks, builds a Navy to defeat the US Pacific fleet, sends 'wolf-warrior' diplomats far afield, and created alternatives to the dollar that America pulls inward and closes off avenues of information to the Chinese people,” said Paul Kolbe, a career CIA officer who spend much of his career countering Soviet propaganda and cover operations.
Mr. Kolbe answered his question in his speech in Jakarta: “We affirm China’s belief that they are rising and that our decline is accelerating.”
