Earlier this month, the WBNA star Brittney Griner arrived home on United States soil after 10 months in Russian captivity. Moscow authorities arrested Griner in February 2020 on trumped-up cannabis-related charges and sentenced her to nine years in a penal colony starting in August. Griner's release sparked criticism of the Biden administration, however, because her freedom was secured in a prisoner exchange that allowed the notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout to return home to Russia. Dubbed the "Merchant of Death," Bout was serving a 25-year sentence for conspiring to provide arms to anti-U.S. terrorist organizations in 2011. An American citizen was free, but at what cost?
The Biden White House is by no means the first U.S. administration to face the challenge of freeing overseas Americans captives. In fact, the founders grappled with the problem of captivity during the republic's earliest days. Then, as now, American diplomats tried to resolve the tension between protecting the life and liberty of individual citizens and upholding broader U.S. foreign policy values.
In July 1785, Algerian corsairs captured two American merchant ships off the coast of Portugal, near the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. The Algerians carried 21 Americans off to an uncertain captivity in Algiers. They had fallen victim to a longstanding practice among the Barbary States of North Africa (Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers and Morocco), who preyed upon foreign merchant shipping in the Mediterranean.
The American crews were the victims of independence. Europeans had long ago learned to cut deals with the local rulers to protect their sailors and cargoes from piracy. So long as American merchants were British subjects, they had enjoyed the protection that the British Crown had negotiated with the sultanates of North Africa. Now that the United States was an independent country, it was open season on Americans.
The Confederation Congress charged John Adams and Thomas Jefferson with securing the release of the Algerian captives. The two future presidents served, respectively, as ambassadors to Great Britain and France, and they were the nearest senior diplomats on hand to negotiate with the Barbary States in the 1780s. They failed. While the pragmatic Adams was prepared to pay to release the captives, Jefferson bristled at the ransom, favoring armed intervention by the brand-new U.S. Navy to force Algiers to let the sailors go. Jefferson believed that the Barbary States posed an existential threat to the peace and prosperity of the fledgling American republic that could not go unchallenged. With no deal in sight, the American crews remained in captivity and United States ships were still tempting targets for Barbary corsairs.
The captives languished in Algiers for over a decade. Some died. A couple managed to get their family and friends to raise the ransom money to pay for their freedom. The George Washington administration finally secured the release of the remaining captives in June 1796 by paying Algiers over $600,000 (approximately $13 million in 2022 money). It took the founders almost 11 years to strike a pretty lousy deal. Still, the surviving sailors finally came home.
Releasing captives isn't about what is just. It's about what is possible.
Negotiating the release of political prisoners has never been easy. The deal to bring Brittney Griner home was far from perfect. Viktor Bout does not deserve to walk free. He is responsible for countless deaths as he trafficked in human misery for decades. Moreover, another U.S. citizen, Paul Whelan, who is falsely accused of espionage, remains in Russian hands. He will spend another Christmas apart from his family.
But releasing captives isn't about what is just. It's about what is possible. With little in the way of a navy, the United States was in no position to fight the Barbary States to secure the release of the captives in the 1780s. If Jefferson and Adams had paid up in 1786, the American sailors would have made it home 10 years earlier and for less money too.
Politics isn't about the art of the deal. The German statesman Otto von Bismarck, hardly a liberal snowflake, was right when he described politics as the "art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best." In an ideal world, the United States would not have to strike shabby deals with shady characters. But in this world, the Biden administration took the least bad option by exchanging Brittney Griner for Viktor Bout. ♦
— Lawrence B.A. Hatter is an award-winning author and associate professor of early American history at Washington State University. These views are his own and do not reflect those of WSU.
