A Voice of America Journal for Promoting Transatlantic Dialogue

As of March 20, 2025, it is unclear if and when the Voice of America (VOA) radio and television broadcasts and online publications will resume following the implementation of President Trump’s Executive Order, Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, which affected the agency’s workforce at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) federal entities, the Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and may force all media grantees, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) to cease operations. As of March 15, the new Trump administration leadership at USAGM placed journalists and support personnel at the Voice of America on paid administrative leave until further notice. USAGM Senior Adviser Kari Lake said, “The U.S. Agency for Global Media will continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview and shed everything that is not statutorily required. She added, “Waste, fraud, and abuse run rampant in this agency, and American taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund it.”

The agency management often terminated individual programs and foreign language services at the Voice of America in the past for various reasons, but this is the first time that VOA has gone completely silent. Former VOA acting associate director and former RFE/RL president Ted Lipien criticized in an op-ed in The Hill what he called “a sudden, harmful and deeply unfair” decision to stop all programming while agreeing that there is the need for quick and drastic reforms. He was in charge of the most successful service in VOA’s history in terms of audience reach expansion and influence. The work of the VOA Polish Service during the struggle for democracy in Poland in the 1980s helped bring about the fall of communism in East Central Europe. During the Cold War, opposition to communism and Soviet influence was the strongest in Poland, the largest country in the former Warsaw Pact. Lipien told The Washington Post writer Sally Jenkins for her article about the role of Voice of America broadcasts in the life behind the Iron Curtain of the famous Czech tennis player Martina Navratilova, who defected in the United States in 1975: “It was a way of showing a finger to the regime,” says former VOA broadcaster and associate director Ted Lipien, who was born in Poland behind the Iron Curtain and, like Navratilova, raised on its transmissions. “Just listening to Western radio was a sign of showing your desire for freedom and your contempt for the regime and censorship.”

After the end of the Cold War, Ted Lipien was one of the creators and editors of The New Europe Review, a multilingual and multimedia online journal of the Eurasia Division of the Voice of America (VOA), launched in July 2004 but discontinued after two years. Promoting transatlantic dialogue could have helped resolve some of the problems that led to the current crisis between the United States and Europe. Yet, despite bipartisan support in Congress for The New Europe Review and the participation of several European leaders, including former Czech President Václav Havel, a new VOA management stopped the project without informing its supporters and advisors. The Voice of America lost a chance to expose and possibly help prevent some of the mistakes of various U.S. administrations in dealing with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and similar mistakes by the European NATO allies.

However, the complete shutting down of the Voice of America operations in 2025 represents a much greater and existential threat to freedom, democracy, and U.S. national security. It gives dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, and terrorist groups worldwide an unchallenged advantage as they spread anti-American and anti-democratic propaganda and disinformation. While agreeing that dysfunctional agency bureaucracy must be reformed, the Cold War Radio Museum supports the immediate resumption of U.S. government-funded media outreach to critical areas of the world.

A Voice of America Journal for Promoting Transatlantic Dialogue

Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum

Nothing underscores the need for a better transatlantic dialogue more than the current crisis in relations between the United States and Europe. In July 2004, the Eurasia Division in the Voice of America (VOA), where I was director in charge of personnel and programs to the former Soviet Union and East-Cenral Europe, launched a monthly multimedia, multilingual online journal, The New Europe Review, to improve the transatlantic dialogue. Our focus was on the countries located between Berlin and Moscow and the Baltic and the Black Seas. I believed then and still do that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would remain the cornerstone of American, European, and world security for the foreseeable future if the leaders on both sides of the Atlantic manage to resolve their differences and avoid breaking their ties based on shared values. The primary goal of The New Europe Review was to prevent misunderstandings before they threatened the transatlantic alliance.

The New Europe Review appeared initially in English and 16 languages used in the VOA Eurasia Division. Russian and Ukrainian editions were added later. Many comments made by political leaders, regional experts, and journalists to The New Europe Review in 2004 and 2005 are still accurate today. Some of the warnings turned out to be true, but some of the predictions, especially about nation building in the Middle East did not.

I’m confident that NATO will be principled in its stand on relations with Russia. I certainly hope that all member states will in that regard stand united and that we will not see divisions appearing such as we have on other questions before.

— President of the Republic of Latvia Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga for The New Europe Review, 2004

And I think it is important that America mobolize others for its values, for its role in dealing with the basic global problems. But America cannot compel others to follow. So, in my view, leadership is the more effective way of exercising a responsible, constructive hegemony, whereas unilateralism based on force—domination, in short, in the end becomes counterproductive.

— President Carter’s National Security Advisor Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski for The New Europe Review, 2004

If we want to be players, we need to reform the European military. Europe spends a third of what the United States spends on defense and it would be a serious partner if it had a third of U.S. capabilities. But we have a long way to go.

— Current (2025) Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski in an article in The New Europe Review, 2004

Let us not worry whether you are going to have a common European defense, or whether or not the French are going to become a power on the continent, like some of my neocon friends say. Good luck! Buy some aircraft carriers. Increase the percentage of your GDP you spend on defense to 3 or 4 percent. I am all for it.

— Senator Joe Biden in an article in The New Europe Review, 2004

The first reactions to the initial articles in The New Europe Review came from the President and Director of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, the Office of the President of Romania, and the Director of the Hoover Library and Archives.

In September 2004, the Serbian version of the journal had an article by Senator Joe Biden, a television interview with Senator Chuck Hegel, a television interview with scholar Francis Fukuyama, and an article by American Enterprise Institute scholar and future Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski.

For launching The New Europe Review project, I received help from Seth Cropsey, director of the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) in the VOA’s parent federal agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which has been known as the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) since 2018. He shared his idea with me of using the Voice of America to exchange opinions between American and European politicians, scholars, and journalists as a way of improving the flow of information and avoiding misunderstandings and conflicts that could lead to costly and dangerous regional wars.

In my new job as the Eurasia Division director since 2003, I had already started regular VOA television news programs broadcast live from Washington via satellite to Ukraine and Russia and a series of televised monthly panels with foreign leaders, members of Congress, U.S. administration officials, Washington think tank experts, and journalists from various VOA language services. Since we were already creating such program content, the Eurasia Division only needed modest funding to design a new multimedia website, transcribe the interviews and discussions into various languages, and produce a monthly newsletter.

In a few weeks, Paul Goble, senior advisor to the IBB director, and I developed a plan for making The New Europe Review a multimedia and multilingual online journal. I recruited President Carter’s former National Security Advisor, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Czechoslovak and Czech President Václav Havel, and former Polish Foreign Minister Bronisław Geremek to serve on our unofficial International Advisory Board. Paul Goble recruited to serve on our International Advisory Board Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, then President of Latvia. We also received support from the Broadcasting Board of Governors chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who was the VOA Director when I was in charge of the Polish Service during the Solidarity labor union’s struggle for democracy in Poland in the 1980s.

The launch of The New Europe Review in July 2004 was noted by the U.S. State Department in its online “Washington File.”

A moment’s reflection will explain why we are doing this. From the perspective of the United States, it is critical that the leaders and peoples of this region begin a conversation both with each other and with the countries outside this region. Such conversations, such exchanges of view and critical dialogues, are at the core of what it means to be a democratic society and a member of the West, the world descended from Athens, Rome and Jerusalem.

Seth Cropsey, Director, International Broadcasting Bureau, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, July 2004

In launching The New Europe Review, we understood that a failure to preserve transatlantic unity would give Russia’s Vladimir Putin a victory, which he has worked for during his entire career, from being a KGB spy to his current role as the head of an oligarchic state. The Russian autocrat’s primary goal has been to surround Russia with vassal nations. To achieve his vision of restoring the Soviet Union or a greater Russia, he and his propagandists have been working on dismantling NATO and the European Union, using hybrid warfare and influence operations to create, amplify, and exploit conflicts within Western societies. Russian disinformation aims at dividing European nations and splitting them from the United States. The New Europe Review was designed to strengthen transatlantic unity against Russia’s attempt to de-link the United States from Europe.

British political novelist William Palmer is one of the few writers in the West who explored life’s moral dilemmas under the double curse of communist and fascist totalitarianism. In his novel The Good Republic (1990), he wrote about an émigré in England in the 1980s who is an exile from Latvia, one of the three Baltic republics forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, later invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany, and re-occupied by the Soviets at the end of the war. “What justice is possible, what historical rescue for peoples whose histories have been destroyed or re-written or whose testimonies have been simply ignored for many years?” William Palmer asked in his essay submitted for publication in the first issue of New Europe Review.

For its inaugural issue, The New Europe Review interviewed the President of the Republic of Latvia, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, who served from 1999 to 2007. She was confident that NATO would be principled and united in its stand on relations with Russia and would not “allow itself to be influenced by nations that are not part of it.”

“The State of Civil Society in the New Europe” is an article in the first issue of The New Europe Review in July 2004 written for the Voice of America Eurasia Division by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, a longtime U.S. human rights activist and student of civil societies in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.

“Memory and Forgetting” is an article in the first issue of The New Europe Review in 2004 submitted to the Voice of America Eurasia Division by William Palmer, a distinguished British novelist who has written extensively about the problems of memory in Eastern and Central Europe.

This is a Polish translation of “Memory and Forgetting,” an article in the first issue of The New Europe Review in 2004 submitted to the Voice of America Eurasia Division by William Palmer, a distinguished British novelist who has written extensively about the problems of memory in Eastern and Central Europe.

From the U.S. perspective, The New Europe Review was strictly bipartisan in its content even though it was launched during the Republican administration of George W. Bush. One of the first issues of the multilingual online journal in 2004 included an analysis of transatlantic relations by then-Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), who was at the time a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later U.S. Vice President and U.S. President. The same issue also included a Voice of America interview by Jela Jevremovic from VOA’s Serbian Service with then-Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The New Europe Review also published in the same issue an interview with Dr. Francis Fukuyama, Professor of International Political Economy at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, which Carol Castiel and Jarosław Anders recorded for VOA’s “Press Conference USA” program. Jarosław Anders and I were co-editors of The New Europe Review. Also in the same issue of the multimedia journal was an article by Radek Sikorski, who at the time was a former deputy minister of foreign affairs and a former deputy minister of defense of Poland. He currently serves as Poland’s foreign minister.

Then-Senator Joe Biden’s message about U.S. foreign policy and transatlantic relations, which he presented in an article posted in The New Europe Review was, ”Let’s grow up and start talking.” Already in 2004, the future U.S. Vice President and later President was noticing a crisis in transatlantic relations.

Let’s Grow Up and Start Talking: Senator Joseph Biden on U.S. Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Relations

Global changes in the last decades, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Europe’s unification all contributed to the recent crisis in transatlantic relations. But they also created new areas of common interest. Cooperation in Iraq is an opportunity that both sides must seize upon.

U.S. Senator Joseph Biden, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, October 2004

---

We Still Need Friend: Foreign Policy for the New Century – A Republican View

Great international venture require cooperation and partnership with other nations, says Senator Hagel. America is a global power, but it cannot do it all by itself. It still needs friends and allies.

U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, October 2004

---

Legitimacy and Power

American hegemony is absolute only in the military domain, says Francis Fukuyama. In order to be an effective global leader America needs legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Americans believe their own institutions and values give them such legitimacy, but they sometimes confuse their national interests and broader interests of mankind.

Francis Fukuyama, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, October 2004

---

Living with a Hyperpower: Ideas on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship

After the attacks of September 11, America adopted a new, muscular strategic doctrine, which enjoys bipartisan support and will likely define U.S. foreign policy for years to come, argues former Polish official and current American Enterprise Institute scholar Radek Sikorski. Europeans need to learn to accept this fact, but Americans must strive to maintain not only their power but also their political and moral appeal.

Radek Sikorski, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, October 2004

---

America Confronts the Paradox of Power

An interview with former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski

There is no alternative to American global hegemony, Brzezinski argues. But America must choose between domination and leadership.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, July 2004

---

After the End of History

by Norman A. Bailey and Criton M. Zoakos

New developments in technology and economy have rendered the old system of sovereign nation-states obsolete leaving the world in a state of chaos, say Baily and Zoakos. Only America, allied with Europe, can usher in a new world order. Does it have the will?

Norman A. Bailey and Criton M. Zoakos, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, July 2004

---

Europe’s Returning Center

by Petr Pithart

Post-communist Central Europe is neither “old” nor “new,” Pithart argues. Rather, it is a state of mind shaped by past historical catastrophes and a lingering sense of danger.

Petr Pithart, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, July 2004

Foreign language services in the Voice of America’s European Division translated New Europe Review interviews and articles from their original language. The VOA Czech Service posted Petr Pithart’s article in Czech.

---

We Need to Redefine the West

An interview with Bronisław Geremek

In order to break out of the present crisis in Euro-American relations, Geremek says, we need to redefine the West as a system of diverse political arrangements united by a common tradition and common interests.

Bronisław Geremek, New Europe Review, Voice of America Eurasia Division, July 2004

---

Some of Senator Joe Biden’s staffers were initially opposed to the VOA New Europe Review project. They may have seen it as an attempt to save VOA’s East European language services. In 2004, VOA stopped direct radio broadcasts in many Central European languages. My idea to promote transatlantic dialogue among members of NATO and preserve the impact and positions of some of the experienced and talented VOA journalists was to produce multimedia content for sharing with local radio and television networks and newspapers and magazines in East-Central Europe.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), as a Delaware corporation grantee receiving federal funding from the same agency in charge of VOA, has always enjoyed strong support from Joe Biden, a U.S. Senator from the state of Delaware. In 2004, his Senate staff may not have liked that the project was supported by the then IBB director Seth Cropsey, a Republican appointee. After I met with Biden’s staffers and explained that VOA and I had complete editorial control, they reluctantly agreed not to oppose launching The New Europe Review. Still, they were never excited about the project, which was quickly abandoned when I retired in 2006 from my last government job as acting VOA associate director.

In launching The New Europe Review in 2004, I received assistance from Seth Cropsey’s advisor, Soviet, Russia, and Central Asia expert Paul Goble, and from numerous journalists and broadcasters in VOA’s Eurasia Division who conducted many of the TV interviews and produced various language versions of the journal. The New Europe Review issue with Senator Joe Biden’s comments on transatlantic relations was produced in 16 languages. Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian editions were later added.

When Seth Cropsey, Paul Goble, Jarosław Anders, and I created The New Europe Review, we wanted to make sure that it would be wholly non-partisan and entirely consistent with the VOA Charter, which mandates that “VOA will represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions.” We also wanted to ensure that both Americans and Europeans would shape the multi-media journal as a political and cultural dialogue platform.

Since The New Europe Review was launched during the Republican administration of President George W. Bush, I reached out to a Democrat, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor and asked him to serve as a member of our International Advisory Board.