I would like to take a short break from the local and national to focus on my own personal interest – international relations. There has been a lot going on recently: leaked Top Secret documents containing intelligence on Russia and U.S. allies, Putin visiting Kherson in Ukraine, Chinese military drills around Taiwan, military infighting in Sudan, normalized Saudi-Iranian relations, the backsliding of democracy and the rule of law in India – the list goes on and on. I would love to write about any of those topics, but at the risk of boring you, I will save them for later.
What I will write about does have an American tint to it. On March 29, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested by the Russian FSB (one of the successor agencies to the infamous KGB) on charges of espionage. This is a truly unprecedented action. The last time an American journalist was arrested there was during the Cold War, and the reporter in question was released after two weeks.
As someone who is currently broadcasting his words through the same medium, I have a particular affinity for Gershkovich and his plight, but his is not the only case I wish to highlight. Many of you recall when professional basketball player Brittney Griner was taken hostage by Russia before finally being released in an exchange for notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout. Canadian-American Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, was also arrested on espionage charges by the FSB. Another former Marine, Trevor Reed, was released in exchange for a Russian pilot who was convicted of smuggling drugs.
The unjustified arrest of Americans does not just take place in Russia, although the motivations may vary considerably more. Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian was arrested and detained by the Iranian government on espionage charges for two years. Former Marine officer and freelance journalist Austin Tice was abducted in 2012 and is believed to be held by the Syrian government or one of its allied paramilitary groups. Aid worker Layla Shweikani was tortured for months before giving false confessions to charges put forth by the Syrian government. She was executed at the age of 26. This case is interesting because it did not receive nearly as much attention as the others, likely because of then-President Donald Trump’s affinity for dictators and his inclination to believe the Assad regime’s claims that aid workers are terrorists. Shweikani was a dual US-Syrian citizen, so he may have preferred she stay in Syria until he could “figure out what the hell is going on” with all these Arab people. We might never know.
The point is, it has become fashionable for weak regimes like the Assad regime in Syria and the Putin regime in Moscow to hold Americans hostage to gain diplomatic leverage, intimidate other activists, aid workers or journalists, or simply be cast aside as collateral damage in a bloated, dark bureaucracy of surveillance, detention, torture and execution. Considering the rise of authoritarianism in what some are portending as the “fourth reverse wave of democratization,” this trend is likely to increase. Thus, if we hope to not lose every Russian we arrest for illegal arms sales to both sides of a conflict, and if we hope to have leverage beyond just yelling though our State Department spokesperson or press secretary stateside while “President” Bashar al-Assad deletes thousands of Syrians as well as a few Americans, our policies need to change.
If we were dealing with other democracies, diplomacy would still be the way. However, using this same strategy with autocrats is like trying to order Starbucks’ coffee in broken French – you are not speaking the same language and you are not going to have the desired effect. Thus, a radical new response to hostage diplomacy must be created, one that can fix current impasses and prevent future incidents. For more on that, stay tuned . . .
