Biden must stop the diplomatic babble and force Iran to release American hostages

President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are fond of saying that human rights are at the center of the administration’s foreign policy, but after nearly 18 months in office, Americans are still being held hostage in the Iranian prisons where they found themselves on Jan. 20, 2021. Hostage-taking is a violation of the fundamental principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, according to the president, a threat to U.S. national security. But the rhetoric, strategy and policy positions of the Biden administration are dangerously out of alignment.

Last month, the White House determined that hostage-taking is a “national emergency” posing “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.” Yet President Biden has not taken the necessary steps to bring Americans home from Iran or to stop Iran from taking Americans hostage in the future. Instead, the Biden administration has been serving a steady diet of half-measures and diplomatic babble in which no firm commitments are made.

Rather than demanding that Iran release its hostages — including the remains of Robert Levinson — and formally renounce future hostage-taking as a condition for resuscitating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Biden administration has been working in overdrive since its first days in office to restore the original Iran nuclear deal. The 2015 agreement did not secure the release of all hostages who were held at that time or create assurances that the policy of hostage-taking that Iran launched in 1979 would finally end — and while the U.S. was a party to the deal, Iran took more Americans hostage. Reporting on the details of the “final” deal designed by the European Union that is under consideration in Washington and Tehran indicates that it similarly leaves behind the hostages.

While the fate of hostages should not be tied to the fate of the JCPOA, neither should the JCPOA be up for discussion until the hostages are released.

The most forceful statement on the matter came toward the end of a hunger strike that I waged in January outside of the hotel in Vienna where the Iranian delegation was negotiating with world powers. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley told me and reporters that “it is very hard for us to imagine getting back into the nuclear deal while four innocent Americans are being held hostage by Iran.”

If Americans are being “wrongfully detained by the Iranian government” and hostage-taking constitutes a threat to our national security, the Biden administration should invalidate U.S. passports for travel to, in, or through the Islamic Republic. This would make travel to Iran by Americans as unlikely as travel to North Korea, which the State Department has banned without special permission. Iran, of course, has taken many more Americans hostage than North Korea, and its record on respecting human rights is just as laughable.

And rather than ratcheting up pressure on the regime running the police state that violates religious freedoms, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, freedom of speech and assembly, the U.S. appears to be content to issue reports and condemnations that have as much chance of changing Iran’s behavior as Iranian declarations against the U.S. have on changing ours. The Biden administration is even considering issuing a visa to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to enter the U.S., despite his being sanctioned for human rights abuses.

American adversaries such as Russia and China are getting away with making multibillion-dollar agreements with Iran, too. Russia is believed to be interested in using against Ukraine the drones that Iran uses to surveil its people and arm its terrorist proxies. China has bought billions of dollars worth of Iranian oil in violation of U.S. sanctions, without any consequence, and the revenue from those oil sales helps to fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) Basij paramilitary forces that have followed orders to “eradicate” Iranian protesters and show “no mercy” to them. 

It is notable that in October 2020, the U.S. designated Iran’s Ministry of Petroleum, the National Iranian Oil Company, and the National Iranian Tanker Company for their financial support to the IRGC.

The United States can’t be content to have a failing strategy to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and no strategy whatsoever to deal with Iran writ large, and the Biden administration can’t claim that human rights are at the center of its foreign policy when human rights don’t factor into what it has determined is its most consequential goal in dealing with Tehran.

President Biden must recalibrate his approach. He must align his words with his deeds. He must bring the hostages home, protect the American people from being taken hostage, and make it as painful as he can for the Iranian regime to continue to be a global leader in violating human rights. That begins with filing a U.S. extradition request for convicted terrorist Assadollah Assadi, as his pending release from Belgium will only incentivize Tehran in taking more hostages. Without this, the U.S. reputation on human rights will decline and the suffering of innocents will continue, day after day and year after year.

Barry Rosen is a survivor of the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, a senior adviser at United Against Nuclear Iran and a founding member of Hostage Aid Worldwide. Follow him on Twitter @brosen1501.