In recent years, it’s become increasingly common for autocratic governments to use arbitrary detention—effectively, hostage taking—as a way to exert pressure on rival governments. It’s a tactic once associated almost exclusively with terrorists. A decade ago, only China and Iran had started appropriating it. But by last year, some 15 states were using it against the U.S. alone. What’s going on?

Jason Rezaian is a columnist for The Washington Post. In 2014, while working as the Post’s bureau chief in Tehran, Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested by Iranian police. Salehi was later freed, while Rezaian was indicted on charges of spying, collaborating with hostile governments, and propaganda against the Iranian establishment. He was released in January 2016, after 544 days in prison.

For Rezaian, the events that led from his initial detention to his ultimate use as a hostage were in some ways peculiar to the internal dynamics of the Iranian regime at the time. But the tactic has proven effective enough that autocrats around the world are now using it more and more. As the incentives to do this get stronger, Rezaian says, they put the U.S. and other affected countries in an accelerating race to counter them …

“People ask me all the time, don’t these kinds of deals just incentivize more hostage taking? My answer is, no—and that this is actually the wrong question. The answer is no, because the reason why China or Russia or Iran keep taking hostages is that there’s nothing deterring them. So the real question is, what can we do to deter autocratic governments from pulling stunts like this in the first place? Because as of now, there’s literally nothing standing in the way—nothing to make the Chinese Communist Party or Putin’s apparatus, or the intelligence services of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, think twice.”

“When I think back to my interrogators, I remember how they knew they were pulling a fast one and getting away with it. They knew that, because the rule of law is so normal in a country like the U.S., when people here read headlines about an American being accused of something there, they read it with a sort of tacit assumption that there must be something to the charge—even if it’s not clear what that would be.”

“I think the U.S. is getting wiser and more street-smart about these cases, and it’s better that it does now rather than later, because the number of cases is rising. There are 50-something of them right now. When I was jailed in Iran, there were four or five of us around the world. Other countries weren’t doing this. Now it’s spreading like a virus.”

Two Concepts of Populism

But the question for American voters, who’ll determine the outcome of the election, isn’t whether Harris will win but how the Democrats would govern under her leadership if she does. For many, that question has already been answered by partisan messaging or media narratives. But for the rest, it’ll be answered by the substance of the policy agenda she advances—and, not least, the style of the political rhetoric she advances it in.

Her opponent, Donald Trump, has his own policy priorities—from ending illegal immigration to dismantling the existing federal bureaucracy—but they all belong to a signature style, a form of populism that pits his supporters against his opponents, often foreigners, and sometimes the U.S. government itself. The style is central to what makes Trump feel as clear and compelling to his supporters as he does.

As David Kusnet, President Bill Clinton’s former chief speechwriter, noted during the first year of the current presidency, Trump won in 2016 because he spoke to “Americans who might have voted for Clinton and Obama but felt let down by the political and economic system.” Vastly outspent by Hillary Clinton, Trump did what she couldn’t—capitalize on broad and deep feelings of disaffection and dislocation in America. It was apparent to Kusnet then that this style wouldn’t be Trump’s alone but ascendant in the Republican Party as a whole. Several Republican lawmakers, including one J.D. Vance, were already experimenting with variations on the theme.

But as Kusnet also pointed out, Biden adopted a populist style of his own, throughout his 2020 campaign and from the outset of his presidency—a “progressive populism” that emphasizes the economy and its bearing on everyday people. The two styles represent two traditions in American politics. To Kusnet, the underlying idea of the cultural tradition Trump represents is, “They think they’re better than you are,” whereas the underlying idea of the economic tradition Biden has represented is, “They’re robbing you blind.”

Biden may not have condemned “millionaires and billionaires” with the same frequency or force as the Democratic senator and self-identifying socialist Bernie Sanders has. Still, Biden has repeatedly framed aspects of his policy agenda as responses to “corporate greed” on behalf of the American working and middle classes. It’s been a relatively forbearing mode of economic populism, Kusnet says, “because it doesn’t attack the wealthy, as such; it just attacks policies that favor the wealthy.” But it’s an idiom that can speak powerfully to millions of undecided voters.

—Gustav Jönsson

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