As President Trump announced the opening strikes of a U.S.-led assault on Iran, he told the country’s soldiers to “lay down your weapons” and urged its people to “take over your government.”
“It will be yours to take,” the president said.
The message was rife with ambiguity. Mr. Trump left it unclear who Iranian soldiers were supposed to surrender to, and how Iranians might overthrow their rulers.
“It’s not like there are American soldiers there and they can put down their weapons right now,” said Philip H. Gordon, a senior foreign policy official in the Obama and Biden administrations. As for the president’s call for the Iranian people to overthrow their regime, Mr. Gordon said: “Which Iranian people? There’s 90 million of them.”
In past conflicts, the United States relied on federally funded media outlets to get its message, coupled with critical journalism, past enemy lines. It created Voice of America during World War II, and Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. The outlets lived on after the Berlin Wall fell, with local language offshoots targeting audiences across the Middle East, in former Soviet countries and elsewhere.
But many critics say that the Trump administration’s cuts to government-funded broadcasting have hurt the United States’ ability to reach the Iranian people — and win their trust — just as Washington is calling on them to rise up.
The Trump administration “has dismantled some of the most potent tools that it has” to get its message out, said Ilan Berman, an Iran expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington think tank.
“This de minimis approach is just not suited for the moment,” said Mr. Berman, who is also a member of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s board.
Last year, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Voice of America was “a TOTAL, LEFTWING DISASTER,” and put nearly all of its 1,400 journalists and support staff on paid leave. He tried but failed to shutter Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, known as RFE/RL, an independent, U.S.-funded group whose outlets include the Persian-language Radio Farda.
Kari Lake, the Trump ally who now runs the parent entity overseeing government-funded media, reversed some of the cuts to Voice of America’s Persian service when Israel and the United States bombed Iran last June, according to news reports. But she continued to berate RFE/RL, asserting in January that its outlets had failed to “align their message with American foreign policy.”
RFE/RL had long broadcast into Iran via a U.S. radio facility in Kuwait, which allowed it to be heard in the country even when the government blocked internet access. It lost its ability to use that transmitter for several months last year amid the dispute with Ms. Lake, and its reach was still limited when Israel and the United States attacked Iran on Saturday.
“Farda was built for this moment,” Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said in an interview on Saturday, as he and his staff scrambled to deal with disruptions to internet access and satellite distribution in Iran. “Our job is to empower the people of Iran by giving them access to timely, relevant information, and amplifying their voices.”
Mr. Capus said that on Saturday, Ms. Lake’s U.S. Agency for Global Media had agreed to carry Farda’s programming on the AM radio waves from the Kuwait transmitter at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s expense.
“We’re still working to effectively transmit our programming on any available means of distribution,” Mr. Capus said, calling Saturday’s agreement “a big first step.”
After Mr. Trump announced the strikes on Iran on Saturday, a Persian translation of his speech by Voice of America was quickly posted to the president’s account on Truth Social. Ms. Lake said in a statement that “V.O.A. Persian went live within hours of this morning’s operation, delivering President Trump’s message and real-time updates to the brave people of Iran through a variety of methods, including satellite.”
“What a glorious moment we are in the midst of,” Ms. Lake wrote on X.
On Voice of America’s Persian homepage, one headline paraphrased Mr. Trump’s message to Iranian soldiers: “Lay down your weapons or face certain death.”
Mr. Gordon said that the risk that the United States faces amid the muddled messaging is that seeking regime change without ground troops can create “even more of a security vacuum into which all sorts of different forces will surge.”
Mr. Gordon served as the assistant secretary of state for Europe when NATO waged an air war against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya in 2011, aiding a rebellion that eventually brought about the dictator’s death but threw the country into further chaos.
In Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, he said, the U.S. military sought to bring about regime change in different ways. But, he said, “all cases were similar in the sense that they turned into a costly disaster.”
Minho Kim contributed reporting.
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
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