Commentary
Hostage-taking by rogue states and terrorists is on the rise, from Iran to China, Russia, Venezuela, and multiple African countries. This is because lucrative hostage trades have incentivized rogue regimes that can now get as much as $1.2 billion, or the freeing of dozens of violent criminals, in exchange for a single hostage.
While every hostage’s life matters, making such trades is penny-wise and pound-foolish. It makes the problem worse in the future.
Instead, the United States and allies should apply President-elect Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy beyond Iran to other rogue states and terrorists globally. If that requires an increase in drone strikes on terrorists and military spending by the United States and allies, then so be it. The alternative is the continued victimization of democracies, whose voting public puts pressure on our leaders to make unreasonably large ransom payments for the hostage of the day. Terrorists and dictators are under no such voter pressure, so they are at an advantage in this deadly game.
The hostage crisis in Israel is currently the worst globally, but the kidnapping tactic is spreading elsewhere, introducing new risks to international business, tourism, and the free press. For Westerners, the outbreak of global kidnapping is especially risky for travelers to the usual suspects: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but also to countries like Venezuela, Mali, Ethiopia, and Tanzania.
How to handle hostage crises is controversial because, on the one hand, the public understandably pressures democratic governments to save hostages, but on the other, strategic considerations require that we not give in to terrorist demands. For two reasons, Israel knows more about the tradeoffs this involves than most.
First, in 2011, Israel traded 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli soldier. Among the released Palestinians were dozens of terrorists, including one from Hamas named Yahyah Sinwar. He later masterminded the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, which killed more than 1,200. During the same attack, the Hamas terrorist group took 251 hostages.
Israel learned its lesson and is now doing everything possible not to submit to further terrorist demands. Israeli leaders know only too well that giving in just postpones the problem to a bigger one in the future. Iran’s sponsorship of regional terrorism and drive for a nuclear weapon make that future risk far more dangerous than the Oct. 7 attack. Unless we nip hostage-taking in the bud, we will soon be dealing with not one or two or 251 hostages but entire cities held hostage by nuclear terrorists.
Second, the Oct. 7 incident was not only a result of Israel’s 2011 hostage release. The United States bears blame as well. In 1973, the Nixon administration rightly adopted a policy against negotiating with terrorists. But this policy was often ignored, especially in the case of terrorist regimes. Perhaps the worst violation of it was in September 2023, just a month before the Oct. 7 massacre. The United States agreed to release $6 billion to Iran in exchange for five Americans held hostage there. That is $1.2 billion per hostage, a massive incentive for rogue regimes and terrorists around the world to engage in yet more kidnappings and wrongful detentions of Americans.
Spanish, French, and German citizens are also vulnerable, and for similar reasons. They do not have a policy against negotiating with terrorists. They frequently submit to millions of dollars worth of ransom demands. That only puts a bigger target on the backs of European travelers.
Now, hostage-taking is a common tool of not only terrorists and criminals but the foreign policy of rogue regimes in China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Through wrongful detentions, they arguably relinquish any claim to being legitimate states and instead put themselves into the category of terrorist states. Beijing arrested Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig in 2018 to gain the release of Huawei’s chief financial officer. Moscow arrested basketball star Brittney Griner in 2022 and journalist Evan Gershkovich in 2023. They were traded in deals that got various alleged Russian criminals freed, including an alleged assassin, arms dealer, hacker, spy, as well as thieves who stole hundreds of millions of dollars. In other words, the world’s most dangerous foreign criminals are free to break the law in our democracies because dictators can always kidnap someone to get their criminals freed.
The United States and allies should pass laws that require the imposition of tougher automatic consequences, such as sanctions and tariffs, on countries that engage in hostage-taking and other kinds of criminal behavior. Terrorists and other hostage-takers should never enjoy negotiations and ransom payments. Military operations to free hostages should almost always be the preferred option over ransoms.
Every effort should be made never to give in to terrorist demands, including criminal regimes in rogue states, as this just incentivizes more hostage-taking down the road. It entails risks to the hostages, but unfortunately, that is the price we must pay to deter many more of our people from getting kidnapped in the future.
