Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO.
EU diplomat Johan Floderus is now back home in Sweden, and so is Iranian-Swedish dual national Saeed Azizi. Professional basketball player Brittney Griner is safely back in America, while consultant Michael Spavor and diplomat Michael Kovrig are back in Canada.
You may be familiar with these names — individuals who were exchanged for a person their state captors wanted released, making headlines across the world over.
And just like them, today every Westerner traveling to a hostile country faces the risk of detention. Still, many travel anyway, knowing their home countries would move mountains to get them free. But that’s a luxury we can no longer afford.
Indeed, there’s one thing all of us can do to help keep our countries safe: Stay home.
The images of Floderus were searing. Seized by Iran while vacationing there two years ago, there he was in an Iranian courtroom, facing a possible death sentence over accusations of espionage. We all wished he’d be able to flee this Kafkaesque nightmare behind. And now, thanks to enormous efforts by the Swedish government, he has.
So has Saeed Azizi, an Iranian and naturalized Swede, who was detained by Iran on espionage charges last year. “Iran has made them both pawns in a cynical negotiating game, with the aim of getting Iranian citizen Hamid Noury released from prison in Sweden. He is convicted of grave offenses committed in Iran in the 1980s. As Prime Minister, I bear a special responsibility for the safety of Swedish citizens. The Government has therefore worked intensively on this matter, alongside the Swedish security services who have negotiated with Iran,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in a statement after the two men were safely returned.
“It has consistently been apparent that the operation would require some difficult decisions. We have now taken those decisions,” Kristersson added. Those decisions involved releasing Noury, an Iranian official convicted, in Sweden, of executing Iranian political prisoners in the 1980s.
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden went to similar lengths to get Griner released from Russia, where she’d been convicted on drug charges. In fact, the U.S. went so far that it agreed to trade her for notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. It had taken a years-long undercover operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to arrest Brout back in 2010, and now, like Noury, he’s a free man again.
So is Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, who’d been detained by Canada on a U.S. arrest warrant. Beijing hadn’t liked the arrest one bit, and retaliated by seizing two Canadians — Spavor and Kovrig — who happened to be in China at the time.
Like Moscow and Tehran, Beijing succeeded in its hostage diplomacy and got Meng released in exchange for the two Canadians. Indeed, countries hostile to the West have discovered hostage diplomacy is an immensely useful tool that can help them force Western governments into making otherwise unthinkable concessions.
Western capitals are aware of the risk — the problem is they can’t stop their nationals from traveling to dangerous countries. The post-Cold War world of ever-increasing peace and prosperity seemingly taught Westerners they could dash off wherever they liked, and should anything happen to them, their governments would help them get out. (Remember the young Briton who flew to Afghanistan during the West’s chaotic exit and filmed his adventures?)
Such a cavalier attitude toward risky countries may have worked when those doing the snatching were criminals, tribal groups and guerillas. But when it’s the governments of major world powers, it becomes an even higher-stakes geopolitical game — one that can cause great harm to Western countries, as the price of their citizens’ release is so high.
What’s more, the concessions Western governments have to make to get their citizens demonstrate they can indeed be blackmailed. Unsurprisingly, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea will continue to exploit this weakness of ours, and other countries could decide to join the hostage diplomacy club.
Western governments don’t ask their citizens to do much for their countries. Over the past couple decades, most haven’t even asked young men and women to do national service. But now that Russia and China have dramatically demonstrated they aren’t above hostage diplomacy, it’s time for Western citizens to do something for their countries.
That something is an extremely simple act that will make a noticeable contribution to their countries’ safety: stay put or go somewhere safe.
There are plenty of places one can visit — including exotic non-Western ones – but there’s absolutely no need for most of us to visit hostile countries that practice hostage diplomacy. The situation currently faced by the Swedish government illustrates the severity of the risk: Despite looming war in Lebanon, some 5,000 Swedes and dual nationals are planning to travel there this summer, and some 2,000 are already there.
Mindbogglingly, several hundred Swedes and dual nationals are even planning trips to Iran over the summer.
Yes, many Westerners do extremely courageous work in dangerous parts of the world — just think of the nuns still operating schools in Haiti. These individuals deserve protection. The rest of us, though, should do a good deed and stay home.
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