Yaroslav Trofimov
Authoritarian states around the world are arbitrarily imprisoning foreign citizens, using them as bargaining chips to achieve geopolitical goals.
Hostage-taking by nation-states—something practiced more often by terrorists and insurgents in the past—has become more and more frequent in recent years. The phenomenon poses a new challenge to Western democracies, especially as rivals like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, all of which have engaged in such behavior, grow closer together amid raging conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The playing field is skewed. Countries with rule of law and independent judiciaries cannot just order tit-for-tat reprisals, grabbing similar hostages in return. They’re also constrained in what they can do to ban travel of their own citizens to adversary nations. Currently, hundreds of citizens of the U.S. and allied democracies are estimated to be held by authoritarian regimes for political reasons, with Russia alone grabbing several Americans in recent months.
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