How Snatching American Citizens Turned Into a Tool of Hostile Governments
The problem was staring up from a deck of cards, handed from one presidency to the next. As the Trump administration exited the White House, its national security team left behind some 30 baseball-style cards for the incoming Biden staff, monuments to an ancient practice that had somehow become a grave 21st-century challenge. Each bore the photo of an American held hostage abroad.
Since then, the problem has metastasized into what the Biden administration calls a national emergency. The risk of Americans being held on spurious charges by a foreign government is now so widespread that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to countries accounting for nearly a quarter of the world’s population.
In diplomatic parlance, those nine nations are classified “D" for the risk of detention. Classification D is America’s gathering new reality: an increasingly piratical global system where the taking and trading of foreign citizens—once the preserve of guerrilla bands or fundamentalist insurgencies—has become a tactic deployed by nuclear states. The Biden administration has brought at least 45 Americans home—mostly via prisoner trades such as last week’s that returned 10 Americans from Venezuela.
And yet it says around 30 U.S. citizens are still unjustly detained abroad, an estimate that doesn’t account for the eight still presumably held in Gaza after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October. The tally does encompass Americans grabbed in countries ranging from Syria and Afghanistan to China—and our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia in March on an espionage charge that he, his government and employer all strongly deny.
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