Biden’s new deal with Iran draws fierce blowback

Biden’s new deal with Iran draws fierce blowback

THE HILL-Sept 13th 2023

A Biden administration agreement with Iran to unfreeze $6 billion of funds to Tehran in exchange for the release of five American prisoners has roiled lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Republicans in Congress and even a few Democrats fear that such a deal encourages hostile nations to take more Americans traveling abroad as hostages in the future.

While the administration has touted the agreement — which comes after more than a year of indirect negotiations between Washington and Tehran — as a diplomatic breakthrough, critics say Washington has catered to a foreign adversary it shouldn’t have negotiated with in the first place.

“If we’re paying a billion dollars per kidnapped individual, then you’re going to see more kidnappings. That’s why you don’t negotiate with terrorists, that’s why you don’t negotiate with kidnappers. The idea of basically paying to release, in this effect, a hostage is a terrible idea,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said.

“Remember back in the Reagan years, we had — was it — guns for hostages, that was the story, remember that? This is a billion dollars for a hostage,” he added.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) called the move “shameful” as it

pays “ransom to the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.”

Even Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) spoke up over “concerns” that President Biden was creating incentives for more Americans to be taken hostage.

“This is an example of why we have to go ahead and make it very clear to Americans that they cannot travel to certain places in the world where they are likely to ultimately become a hostage. Until we do that we will constantly be in a set of circumstances” where the United States faces negotiations to free detained Americans, Menendez told reporters Monday.

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https://thehill.com/policy/international/4201036-bidens-new-deal-with-iran-draws-fierce-blowback/