The Biden administration has been widely praised for releasing Russian spies, assassins and illegal arms dealers in return for the release of innocent Americans.
Conspicuously lacking amid all the praise and celebration was any consideration of the long-term consequences of such deals; nay, any awareness that there might be such.
The assumption appears to be that any time a thuggish government takes Americans hostage we should make a deal to get them back in return for whatever the thuggish government wants, so long as what they want isn’t entirely unreasonable; that a failure to do so would suggest a lack of compassion and statesmanship.
Left unexplained is how such an approach does something other than reward hostage-taking as a tactic or how it doesn’t allow the short-term moral imperative–the safe return of our people–to effectively undermine the long-term moral imperative of discouraging our people from being taken.
The plaudits for Biden’s hostage swap contain the rather peculiar proposition that giving those who take hostages what they want is inarguably praiseworthy.
Rogue regimes (like Vladimir Putin’s) and terrorist organizations (like Hamas) don’t, after all, take hostages purely for the sadistic pleasure of it; they seize them to trade them in precisely the kinds of deals Biden just made.
The hostages were taken in the first place because it was assumed we would negotiate for their release, and negotiations invariably involve concessions from us that amount to rewards for them. Such an approach not only fails to deter hostage-taking as a tactic but also more broadly incentivizes bad actors to engage in other kinds of nefarious activity, including spying and assassination, by removing some of the penalties for doing so. If all it takes is seizing a random American here or there to win the freedom of assassins and other scum, then random Americans here or there will be seized and all Americans traveling abroad will be placed in greater danger.
All of which also leads to some rather depressing thoughts about the challenges posed by a world that inevitably includes a constantly fluctuating mixture of democracies and despotisms.
Not yet having reached Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” wherein democracy as a form of governance finally becomes universal, democracies will continue to have to interact with and counter a range of despicable regimes (see China, Russia, Iran and North Korea for starters).
Law-abiding, democratic nations that value human life and have a moral compass will thus have to operate in a world which features authoritarian regimes that don’t value human life, don’t adhere to the conventions of international law and are entirely amoral in their conduct of relations with other states.
Which is another reason why perhaps the greatest folly inherent in the diplomatic tendencies of democratic states is to engage in wishful thinking about their dictatorial counterparts; to mistakenly assume that they share our values and are working toward the same goals. To the contrary, thug states reflexively feel threatened and are made insecure by the mere existence of free, democratic states and always make it their primary mission to undermine them in whatever ways possible.
Dictators like Putin will especially seek to use, as in the Biden hostage exchange, the moral compasses and humanitarian sensibilities of democracies against them.
While it would be unthinkable for democratic governments to take the citizens of other nations hostage, it is also curious that dictatorships don’t take as hostages the citizens of other dictatorships either, apparently seeing no profit in it.
Birds of a feather flock together in world politics as in other realms, and there’s a reason why the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians cooperate so extensively at our expense despite their vast differences in other respects.
Our willingness to cut deals to get our people back speaks well of us, of our value for human life, but also leaves us vulnerable to the predations of those who don’t value it nearly as much.
Democratic states like Britain and France and Japan can work out sets of rules that reflect shared moral values, but those rules will be of no use when it comes to rogue states, leaving democratic states no choice but to adopt some of their ruthlessness in order to protect their interests.
Because the international system is a “self-help” system, the good must sometimes imitate the bad in order to survive.
Rather than negotiating with hostage-takers for the release of hostages, we should instead make it our goal to deny them their anticipated rewards and, better still, inflict severe punishments for having engaged in a practice that now threatens to become all too common, even routine.
The nations that refuse to negotiate with hostage-takers and stand by those declarations, however difficult to do in emotional terms at the time of testing, will be the nations whose citizens won’t be taken hostage; rather, the targets will opportunistically shift toward those who convey weakness in such respects.
The hunch is that unless we begin to think this through with other than short-term sentimentality driving our decisions, we are going to see lots more American families pleading with our government to win the release of family members.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
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Publish date : 2024-08-11 20:40:00
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