Halifax, Canada — The U.S. government’s top envoy tasked with freeing American hostages around the world said that Washington is working on building an international coalition akin to NATO, to deter hostage-taking.
That official, Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, said that the world’s democracies are coming together to use their instruments of national power to deter authoritarian regimes’ intensifying efforts to detain Americans overseas. It’s not clear exactly how many Americans the State Department has labeled as “wrongfully detained,” but in 2022, Carstens said that his office is dealing with 30 to 40 cases.
Speaking at the Halifax International Security Forum today, Carstens said that Secretary of State Antony Blinken directed him to work on creating “a NATO Article 5 effort so when a person is taken from a country, nation states feel compelled to try to help out and work with each other.”
Carstens said that he’s been working on that effort for two years and that efforts to build the coalition are ongoing.
He was appointed to the role in 2020, during the Trump administration, and was kept in place by President Biden. He said that Biden’s efforts have led to the release of 37 Americans previously held overseas.
Several of the agreements that resulted in those releases have received significant criticism from congressional Republicans and other observers, who charge that the White House has conceded too much in talks with hostage-taking dictatorships and that several of these cases will lead to the wrongful detention of more Americans. Some of the most contentious deals included the prisoner-swap agreement involving WNBA star Brittney Griner and Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer, and the exchange of five American hostages held by Iran for the release of Iranians indicted on criminal charges in the U.S. and the waiver of sanctions on $6 billion that South Korean banks owed Tehran.
Carstens defended the administration’s overall approach, saying that it’s unrealistic to expect that authoritarian regimes would free U.S. hostages without receiving anything in return.
“You have to find some sort of accommodation. The decisions that you make are very hard and brutal,” he said, adding that his team evaluates the national-security risk posed by potential prisoner swaps before taking a potential deal to the president.
“The individual matters, and bringing people home matters, families matter. And our job is to, as your government, find ways to bring those families back and to unite them again.”