The Signal and the Noise: Washington's Contradictory Campaign to Reach the Iranian People

The Trump administration says it wants to talk directly to the Iranian people. It has also defunded the primary tools for doing so. That contradiction sits at the center of a U.S. strategy that claims to bypass Tehran's information blockade while simultaneously dismantling decades of American broadcasting infrastructure built for exactly that purpose.

The Stated Strategy

Since entering office in January 2025, the Trump administration has framed its Iran policy around a separation thesis: drive a wedge between the Iranian public — broadly sympathetic to Western values, the logic goes — and the clerical establishment that governs them. President Trump's eight-minute video posted to Truth Social in early 2026, which ended with an appeal to Iranians to overthrow their authoritarian government, was the most visible expression of this approach [1].

The strategy draws on a long tradition. From Cold War Radio Free Europe broadcasts into the Soviet bloc to Voice of America's Persian service, the United States has a 75-year history of speaking over the heads of adversary governments to their populations [2]. But unlike the Cold War, when institutional commitment to these efforts was bipartisan and sustained, the current iteration is marked by internal contradictions that its own architects have yet to resolve.

Gutting the Infrastructure

On March 14, 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the elimination of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." The following day, senior USAGM advisor Kari Lake announced the termination of the Open Technology Fund's federal grant, stating the "award no longer effectuates agency priorities" [3].

The consequences cascaded quickly. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — which operates Radio Farda, the Persian-language service reaching an estimated 6.5 million Iranians weekly, roughly 10% of the adult population — saw its funding terminated [4]. More than half of Radio Farda's staff were furloughed. Voice of America placed over 1,000 broadcasters on administrative leave [5]. A year later, USAGM-affiliated outlets are "largely shadows of their former selves," according to a Poynter assessment, with some having halted production entirely [5].

Source: USAGM / Congressional Appropriations

Data as of Mar 14, 2025CSV

The budget trajectory tells the story: USAGM appropriations rose steadily from $808 million in FY2019 to $875 million in FY2024, with a $950 million request for FY2025. Then the executive order effectively zeroed it out [6]. RFE/RL sued the administration to challenge the cuts. Its CEO, Stephen Capus, told NPR the organization was "living off its savings" [4].

The Open Technology Fund — which funded VPN tools and circumvention technology used by millions of Iranians to bypass government censorship — was similarly cut. The Washington Post reported in August 2025 that the funding break left "Iran internet freedom projects in peril" [7]. The OTF warned that millions of VPN users in Iran could lose access within weeks if funding was not restored [8].

Who Is Actually Being Reached

Understanding the audience gap is critical to evaluating the strategy. Nearly 90% of Iranian internet users rely on VPN services to circumvent government restrictions, according to a 2025 report from the Tehran E-Commerce Association [9]. That figure, up from 80% in 2024, reflects both the sophistication of Iran's censorship apparatus and the determination of its citizens to get around it.

But the 90% figure applies to internet users, not all Iranians. Iran's National Information Network — the government's intranet-like system designed to replace the global internet — creates a structural divide. Urban, educated, younger Iranians with technical literacy and financial means to acquire VPN subscriptions represent the bulk of those accessing foreign content. Rural populations, older demographics, and lower-income households face far steeper barriers [10].

Iran shut down the internet entirely for 170 hours in 2025, costing its economy an estimated $214.7 million and affecting 71.9 million people [9]. During the June 2025 shutdown, VPN demand surged 707% above baseline, but when authorities cut international connectivity entirely — as they did during the January 2026 blackout — VPNs became useless [11].

Source: Top10VPN / NetBlocks

Data as of Dec 31, 2025CSV

Radio Farda's response to the January 2026 blackout was telling: it returned to shortwave radio broadcasts, a Cold War-era technology that does not depend on internet infrastructure [12]. In the week before the blackout, Radio Farda's Instagram content was viewed 241.8 million times, with 96% of views originating from inside Iran [12]. Those numbers demonstrate both the hunger for independent information and the fragility of digital delivery channels.

The Historical Track Record

The effectiveness of U.S. public diplomacy campaigns aimed at adversary populations is a contested question among researchers. The strongest success case is Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, when the United States "occupied the moral high ground relative to the Soviet Union and spoke of freedom to publics that wanted to be free," as a Georgetown University analysis put it [2].

But that case had features absent in the Iran context. Cold War broadcasting was sustained over four decades with bipartisan institutional support. It operated in a geopolitical environment where the U.S. narrative of freedom versus communism had broad international legitimacy. And it was paired with policy actions — the Marshall Plan, NATO security guarantees, cultural exchange programs — that gave the messaging material credibility [13].

Post-9/11 U.S. public diplomacy toward Iran has been "widely seen as self-serving rhetoric, a cover for unilateral efforts to pursue the war on terror and expand U.S. influence in the Middle East," according to analysis from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy [13]. VOA Persian's viewership has been described as "particularly disappointing given Washington's inherent advantages in reaching Iranian audiences" [13]. Radio Farda, by contrast, has attracted audiences partly because surveys show many Iranian listeners do not realize it is funded by the U.S. government [13] — a finding that raises its own questions about the ethics and sustainability of covert-origin messaging.

The Legal Gray Zone

International law scholars have identified foreign influence operations as occupying an uncomfortable space between permissible diplomacy and prohibited intervention. Three interrelated norms govern the analysis: sovereignty, non-intervention, and self-determination [14].

The challenge is that international law clearly prohibits armed intervention but is far less definitive about information campaigns. France takes the position that "respect for sovereignty" is itself an international law rule, meaning the distortion of political processes through information operations can constitute a violation. The United Kingdom favors the narrower "non-intervention" principle, which requires coercion — not mere persuasion — to trigger a legal violation [14].

This legal ambiguity cuts both ways. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps conducts its own foreign messaging operations through outlets like Press TV and various social media influence campaigns. If U.S. public diplomacy toward Iran constitutes unlawful interference, so do Iranian operations targeting Western publics — and vice versa. The practical reality is that both governments conduct influence operations that are "politically abhorred but often do not break any major laws," creating what scholars describe as a gray zone that states "eagerly exploit" [14].

The Censorship and Retaliation Machine

The Iranian government's response to foreign media consumption by its citizens has grown more punitive. In February 2024, the Supreme Council of Cyberspace criminalized the use of VPNs without a government-issued license [10]. In July 2025, parliament passed a bill titled "Combating the Spread of Untrue News Content" — denounced by rights groups as an attempt to "deepen censorship, criminalize dissent, and consolidate the state's monopoly over information" [15].

The enforcement is not abstract. Iranian authorities have opened judicial cases against Instagram users for liking posts critical of the Islamic Republic, with citizens charged with "insulting the leader" and "propaganda against the state" [15]. In August 2024, journalist Hossein Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to 12 years in prison after responding to a post by Ayatollah Khamenei on X with a single period [15]. Freedom House gave Iran a score of 11 out of 100 in its 2025 Freedom on the Net report [16].

These facts mean that U.S. outreach campaigns carry a measurable personal risk for their intended audience. Iranians who engage with American-funded content, share it, or act on its messaging face potential prosecution under vaguely worded statutes covering "antirevolutionary behavior," "corruption on earth," and "crimes against Islam" [15]. The administration has not publicly addressed how its outreach strategy accounts for this dynamic.

The Counterproductive Case

Academic research on the "rally around the flag" effect in Iran presents a more complex picture than either proponents or critics of U.S. outreach acknowledge.

A 2024 study published in Foreign Policy Analysis at Oxford found that U.S. sanctions — a parallel form of external pressure — tend to increase pro-government mobilization in support of authoritarian leaders [17]. External attacks "tend to trigger a rally-around-the-flag effect, whereby citizens are more likely to defend and less likely to challenge the regime when that regime is beset by outsiders" [17].

Source: World Bank Open Data

Data as of Dec 31, 2024CSV

Iran's inflation rate, which hit 44.6% in 2023 and remained at 32.5% in 2024, reflects the economic toll of sanctions and conflict — conditions that the administration argues should turn the population against its government [18]. But the rally-around-the-flag literature suggests the causal chain may not be so simple.

However, the effect is disputed. Some analysts argue that "if you do see a rally, it's short lived and it's not as sticky" [17]. The 2022 Mahsa Amini protests — the largest anti-government demonstrations in decades — occurred during a period of intense external pressure on Iran, suggesting that domestic grievances can overwhelm nationalist solidarity under certain conditions. The question is whether external messaging amplifies or dampens that dynamic, and the honest answer is that the evidence is mixed.

A separate concern raised by analysts at War on the Rocks is the "Phase II problem": even if U.S. messaging successfully delegitimizes the Iranian government among its population, there is no articulated plan for what comes after [19]. Regime change rhetoric without a transition strategy risks creating chaos rather than reform.

A Fractured Diaspora

The Iranian-American community — the natural intermediary for any campaign to reach Iranians — is itself deeply divided over the merits of U.S. outreach. As NPR reported in March 2026, the diaspora community has "publicly shattered" since the beginning of U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran [20].

In Los Angeles — home to the largest Iranian-American population outside Iran — the split is visible. Hundreds of Iranian Americans have protested with chants of "Stop the war in Iran," while across town, other members of the same community have celebrated what they see as the start of regime change, carrying American, Israeli, and Iranian flags [21]. Those perceived as supporting military action are labeled "Zionists" online; anti-war voices are accused of being pro-regime [21].

The Atlantic Council has recommended that the administration "immediately name or designate an envoy or senior official to engage with the Iranian diaspora" [22]. But the fundamental question of representation — who speaks for the diaspora, who is consulted, who is excluded — remains unresolved. As NBC News reported, "the diaspora is not one single bloc with one single vision" [21], and any messaging strategy that treats it as such risks alienating as many people as it mobilizes.

Missing Success Metrics

The most significant gap in the administration's strategy is the absence of defined success metrics. If the explicit goal is to separate the Iranian people from their government, what does success look like? How is it measured? On what timeline?

The administration's broader Iran policy has centered on nuclear negotiations. In February 2025, Trump reinstated the "maximum pressure" campaign, demanding that Iran fully dismantle its nuclear program, halt all enrichment, and end support for regional proxy groups [23]. In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched military strikes against Iranian targets [24]. By May 2026, reports indicated that U.S. and Iranian negotiating teams had reached a 60-day memorandum of understanding extending a ceasefire and setting up nuclear talks, with Iran required to remove mines from the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days [25].

Where direct public outreach fits within this matrix of military strikes, sanctions, and diplomacy is unclear. Is it a precondition for a deal? A complement to military pressure? A standalone initiative with its own objectives? The Arms Control Association described the overall approach as "chaotic and reckless" [26]. The Lowy Institute concluded that "Trump got Iran wrong" [27].

The Contradiction

The fundamental tension is structural. An administration that says it wants to reach the Iranian people has defunded the primary U.S.-funded tools for doing so — Radio Farda, Voice of America, and the Open Technology Fund's internet freedom programs. It has pursued military strikes that researchers say risk triggering nationalist solidarity rather than anti-government sentiment. It has failed to articulate success metrics, timelines, or a theory of change that connects messaging to policy outcomes.

Radio Farda's return to shortwave radio — a technology from the 1940s — after the January 2026 blackout is perhaps the most fitting symbol of the contradictions at play [12]. The service was broadcasting into Iran on a skeletal staff, with terminated funding, using equipment designed for a different era, while the administration that cut its budget claimed to be pursuing the same goal the service was built to achieve.

The Iranian public, meanwhile, continues to find ways around censorship. The 90% VPN usage rate suggests a population that does not need to be convinced of the value of uncensored information [9]. The question is not whether Iranians want to hear from the outside world. The question is whether Washington has a strategy that matches its rhetoric — or whether the rhetoric is the strategy.