Iran Can Hold America Hostage in Either War or Peace
For nearly a half century, through eight American Presidencies, Iran has employed the most cost-effective tactic of warfare—both ancient and modern—by seizing someone or something of value and holding it hostage. The practice initially played out with human beings: In 1979, fifty-two American diplomats were held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for four hundred and forty days, until the Carter Administration unfroze eight billion dollars of Iranian assets and lifted an economic embargo. Between 1984 and 1991, two dozen Americans were taken hostage by Lebanese militias aligned with Iran. Terry Anderson, the A.P. bureau chief in Beirut, was chained to a radiator for the better part of seven years. Iran brokered their releases, in one case for American weaponry, in a covert swap during the Reagan Administration, only for its proxy to then pick up more Americans.
Iran knows the tactic can squeeze out political concessions, too. In 1985, Iranian allies in Hezbollah hijacked TWA 847, a flight travelling from Athens to Rome, with a hundred and forty-seven passengers, plus crew members, on board. For seventeen days, the Boeing 727 flew back and forth across the Mediterranean between Beirut and Algiers. The Iranian proxy demanded—and won—the release of more than seven hundred and sixty Lebanese Shiites imprisoned in Israel.
Even amid Iran’s military failures and economic vulnerabilities, these seizures and the concessions they’ve won have enhanced the Islamic Republic’s sense of self and power. Its perverse deeds have boosted the revolutionaries, never bothered all that much by their violations of several international laws or the global condemnation.
During the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations, Iran nabbed dozens of other Americans. Haleh Esfandiari, my former colleague at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was visiting her ninety-three-year-old mother in Tehran, in 2006, when she was picked up. She endured months in solitary confinement in the notorious Evin Prison until she was released in 2007 on bail—for basically the value of her mother’s home. The case demonstrated how much leverage the Islamic Republic could yield with such a straightforward tactic. The international media covered the Esfandiari drama heavily; then Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton took her case to the Senate floor.
In the past decade, the practice has continued to prove financially lucrative. As a by-product of the nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama Administration brokered the release, in early 2016, of several Americans, including the Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian and my former research assistant Matt Trevithick, who was captured while enrolled in an intensive Farsi language program at the University of Tehran. In exchange, Washington agreed to release or drop charges against seven Iranians jailed in the United States. The terms also granted Iran access to fifty billion dollars of its own assets, which had been blocked in banks by international sanctions. The United States sent an additional $1.7 billion to Tehran, four hundred million dollars that the Shah had paid in the seventies to purchase U.S. military equipment—which had never been delivered, due to the Revolution—plus $1.3 billion in interest. In 2023, five Americans, including my friend Siamak Namazi, who had been imprisoned for eight years, were released after the Biden Administration unfroze six billion dollars of Iranian funds and granted clemency to five Iranians imprisoned in the U.S.
Today, Iran continues to use people as leverage; six Americans are currently imprisoned there. The reality is that the Islamic Republic, though outgunned, outmanned, and far weaker militarily than the U.S., has adapted its favorite tactic by effectively taking the world hostage when it seized control of the Strait of Hormuz. “The Iranians have demonstrated that they can really bring the regional economy, and really the world economy, grinding to a halt,” Michael Singh, who worked on nuclear issues for the George W. Bush Administration, said at a recent panel at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
That dynamic plays out in diplomacy. “Washington tends to view negotiations with Iran through the lens of power. Tehran views them through the lens of possession,” Brett McGurk, who worked on Middle East issues, including hostages, for the past four Administrations, wrote for CNN.com. “Washington aims to force Iran to succumb to demands through economic pressure and sanctions. Tehran aims to force the U.S. to succumb after acquiring something valuable and refusing to give it back.”
Iran has demonstrated its ability to hold out, sometimes for years, for what it wants, while the U.S., with its two- and four-year election cycles, has limited patience. Washington countered Tehran’s seizure of the Strait with its own blockade of any ship coming from or going to Iran—but the conflict is costing U.S. taxpayers an estimated two billion dollars a day. As part of its price to end the war, Iran has demanded twenty-four billion dollars in frozen assets—four times the amount that was part of the hostage deal in 2023. (Iran never received that six billion dollars, because it was refrozen after Hamas attacked Israel.) “This twenty-four billion dollars is a test of trust,” General Mohsen Rezaie, the Revolutionary Guard commander who is now the military adviser to Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, told CNN. “It’s a test America must pass.” Given the exorbitant sum, it also sounded a bit more like the beginning of negotiations at an Iranian bazaar.
On Thursday, President Trump announced—for the thirty-ninth time—that the war with Iran was over. An initial agreement to extend the fragile ceasefire would be signed within days, possibly this weekend, by Vice-President J. D. Vance, at an unspecified location in Europe, Trump said. (The President will be busy celebrating his eightieth birthday at a U.F.C. bout on the White House lawn on Sunday.) The Strait of Hormuz would then “open immediately with the signing.” The terms, he said, include “a very strong memorandum of understanding,” which he described variously as “in pretty final shape,” “a little conceptual,” and “more notional.”
Late on Friday night, Iran announced that Tehran and Washington were in the final stages of an agreement that would temporarily end conflicts in both Iran and Lebanon. According to the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, the agreement states in writing that the two long-standing enemies would respect each other’s sovereignty and rule. That basically means that the U.S. will not engage in any actions to undermine or topple the Islamic Republic—in other words, there will be no attempt at “regime change,” an idea cited by both Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the early days of the war. That would be a huge victory for the Islamic Republic.
Araghchi also claimed that Israel would be required to withdraw from Lebanon and end its attacks on Hezbollah, which effectively links the two separate battlefields. Israel now occupies more than ten per cent of Lebanon; Netanyahu has always claimed its attacks on its northern neighbor are defensive. So far, Israel has not been part of the negotiations, led by mediators from Pakistan and Qatar.
In a major shift, according to Araghchi, the agreement also establishes that, in the future, the Strait will remain under Iranian control and never revert to its prewar status. All commercial traffic will have safe passage, but Iran will eventually impose a “service fee” for transiting vessels. Both of these stipulations represent a significant and costly change for a waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s energy supplies travel. Both would be momentous, long-term gains for Tehran.
However the diplomacy plays out in the days ahead, a new principle has been established: Just as taking people hostage changed the strategies of modern terrorism, Tehran’s seizure of a vital international waterway has altered modern warfare. “It’s a good parallel,” John Limbert, who was one of the American diplomats taken hostage in 1979, told me. “The larger parallel to me is the Iranians overplaying their hand and doing enormous damage to themselves,” as they did during the hostage crisis. “It’s always dangerous when you start believing your own rhetoric,” he added. Yet, the theocracy is still in place, despite forty years of escalating political, economic, and environmental crises, along with growing public unrest.
“Hormuz from now on is not going to go back to the situation of past decades,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator for Iran who is now a researcher at Princeton, told me. Hormuz will continue to be “a major element of deterrence of Iranian strategy.” Mousavian balked at the idea that Iran was taking the world hostage. He called it leverage. “Iran has been faced with the madman policies of Israel and the U.S.,” he said. “If you are mad, we are going to be more mad than you. This is what they are doing practically.”
Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that Iran has “felt no choice [but] to go for this move, to up the global consequences of a war in an asymmetric way to place pressure on a nuclear-armed military superpower.” But Tehran has limits, too, on how long it can weaponize the waterway’s choke point, without further crippling its own flailing economy. Iran is estimated to lose more than four billion dollars in revenues a day because of the U.S. blockade constricting its oil exports. “Iran’s hardened security establishment realizes the Strait must reopen, but the key question is how,” she told me. “Their narrative is: While American and Israeli bombs left the homeland in ruins, they have resisted and managed to extend Iran’s sovereignty and power over a choke point the entire world depends on. By imposing a postwar sovereignty over the strait,” she said, “they are in part trying to demonstrate victory to their base.”
Trump also appears—again and again—to want to craft a victory narrative for his constituency. But a memorandum of understanding, despite its diplomatic title, is only a broad set of principles that still need to be laboriously negotiated, especially the nuclear program, which was the main reason that the U.S. and Israel originally went to war on February 28th.
The status of both the war and the peace negotiations has been more dizzying with each day. On X, Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent for The Economist and the author of “How Long Will Israel Survive?,” mused, “American credibility has deteriorated to the point where the president can announce a diplomatic agreement and the near-universal reaction is ‘let’s wait for confirmation from Tasnim,’ ” which is the semi-official media of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. On Friday, Tasnim countered that no deal was, as yet, done. It also reposted Carlstrom’s comment on its own X account. ♦