The Trump administration is trying to shut down the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), all of which receive U.S. government funding. It has silenced, at least for now, the Voice of America (VOA), which had been operating every day since its birth in 1942. It is also trying to destroy other government-supported media, including Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL), Radio Martí (broadcasting to Cuba), and Radio Free Asia (reaching China and Southeast Asia).

All these organizations have missions to advance American interests by advancing American values, including the rule of law, democracy, and a free press. (Full disclosure, I am on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.) The administration has not provided much explanation for these moves, besides calling the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the umbrella organization for VOA, RFE/RL, and the other media, “a giant rot,” and Elon Musk calling NED “a scam.”

What’s going on? Why such animus against instruments intended to advance both American interests and what both political parties used to think of as American values? It’s a long story.

As the United States rose to world leadership, it did so not only in the name of its own national interests narrowly or transactionally defined. Instead, it did so in the name of universal values, a breathtaking and, to the European imperial powers, it sought to supplant, infuriating self-confidence. Americans were slow to conclude that U.S. national interests and the universal values of freedom were linked. President Abraham Lincoln famously argued that the American nation was based not on common blood but on the values of the Declaration of Independence that are applicable to “all men and all times.” That suggested that U.S. national interests were somehow tied to such foundational values. President William McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, whose first big job was as Lincoln’s private secretary, made in 1899 and 1900 a values-based case against European and Japanese imperialist designs against China, the once-famous “Open Door Policy.” (Of course, Hay also presided over the United States’ own imperial grab of Spanish colonies in the Spanish-American War of 1898.)

President Woodrow Wilson, for all his flaws and hypocrisies, laid out the first full case for U.S. strategy based on........

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