This past Monday, five United States nationals returned home to their families after being held for years in Iranian prisons. In exchange for the Americans’ freedom, the U.S. agreed to release five Iranians from American prisons and to unfreeze nearly $6 billion dollars’ worth of Iranian assets for humanitarian uses.
The deal is extremely controversial. Congressional Republicans have criticized the Biden administration’s willingness to negotiate prisoner swap deals, arguing that the deals’ success will only incentivize the United States’ adversaries to further unfairly imprison Americans for bargaining leverage. In particular, the Biden administration’s agreement to unfreeze the billions of Iranian assets has been denounced as akin to a ransom payment.
However, what’s important here is that the U.S. has not spent and will not lose any money on this deal. The money exchanged was debt South Korea owed Iran in legal oil sales, which U.S. sanctions froze in 2019. The agreement will transfer the assets to a Qatari bank, through which Iran can access them. Furthermore, the Iranian government has agreed to only use the funds to pay for designated humanitarian purposes, including food, medicine, and agricultural goods.
The deal is a breakthrough in diplomacy between the adversarial countries – one which required years’ worth of indirect talks to be successful. Just three years ago, the U.S. assassination of a top Iranian general threatened to escalate to an open military conflict, so the success of the prisoner swap represents a step forward for the possibility of further negotiations.
Nevertheless, Iranian-U.S. relations remain at a low point, with tensions remaining high over the ongoing expansion of the Iranian nuclear program and U.S. naval troops’ build-up in the Persian Gulf. The Biden administration says its relationship with Iran has not changed and continues to strongly warn any American against traveling to Iran, and U.S. officials say the deal is unrelated to a potential revival of nuclear talks, which have largely stalled since the 2015 collapse of the international Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement (J.C.P.O.A.). The two countries remain staunchly divided on the Iranian government’s crackdown on protesters and the drones it has sold to Russia for the latter’s war in Ukraine, and while the detained Americans and Iranians were returning home, the U.S. actively imposed new sanctions against former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
Despite the continuing tensions, however, the prisoner swap agreement demonstrates that the door is at least partially open for diplomatic engagement. It may also signal how future deals may unfold, with negotiations conducted indirectly and in unwritten terms rather than a formal procedure overseen by international institutions like the J.C.P.O.A. As such, the exchange is a win for diplomacy.
