Moral math: Does 1 WNBA star = 1 arms dealer?

A thought experiment... What is your immediate response to the following words and concepts: freedom and individual rights; justice and the rule of law; the vision of a long-separated family finally able to reunite for the holidays.

By far most of us, I’m sure, would say they’re all positive and worth cherishing. And so, too, would heads of government in America and other democracies across the globe, who argue that world politics cannot be only about the exercise of power or the search for short-term gain.

Politics should be rooted in values.

Yet the controversy surrounding United States President Joe Biden’s prisoner swap to secure the freedom of Brittney Griner, an American basketball star effectively held hostage in Russia, has underscored something too rarely acknowledged about such “values-based” foreign policy.

It’s a lot easier said than done.

Almost always, it requires weighing, or even surrendering, one deeply held value in order to secure another – especially when dealing with autocratic leaders for whom democratic values are irrelevant to the pursuit of their own policy goals.

Even on broad geopolitical questions which might seem straightforward – like the stand taken by America and its allies against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine – values-based policy often requires values choices.

In the service of his overriding goal – the defense of Ukraine’s democratic government – Mr. Biden has found himself needing to make nice with U.S. partners like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, whose records on human rights he knows to be appalling.

Still, the plight of Ms. Griner, and the several dozen other Americans held captive in Russia or in other autocratic states, throws up especially difficult choices.

These prisoners are U.S. citizens. Some have been detained on trumped-up charges. Others have committed relatively minor offenses and been sentenced, in trials no democracy would recognize as fair, to long, grueling confinement.

They’re effectively being held to political ransom.

And in Ms. Griner’s case, President Biden decided to pay.

He agreed to release Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer arrested in 2008 after being ensnared in a U.S. sting operation. He was sentenced to a 25-year jail term for telling DEA agents he would sell arms to Colombian rebels, adding he had no problem if they were used against Americans seeking to disrupt that country’s cocaine trade.

In making the deal to free Ms. Griner, the president was clearly acting from a values-based impulse. Indeed, our “thought experiment” describes almost perfectly the arguments he would have made to himself, colleagues, and aides in deciding to pursue the deal.

For critics, however, it was a decidedly unequal trade: Russia’s “merchant of death” in return for a basketball player.

But what has unsettled even some Biden supporters about his decision are the values trade-offs it involved.

The deal did not secure freedom for two other Americans still held in Russia: Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine imprisoned on what both he and Washington say are invented charges of espionage; or Marc Fogel, a schoolteacher serving a 14-year sentence for possession of a small quantity of medical marijuana prescribed in the U.S.

And a more fundamental question is raising its awkward head: Didn’t agreeing to any deal, whatever the terms, risk encouraging Russia and other countries that have already seized Western nationals to engage in further hostage taking?

This last concern will have resonated with allies as well.

The Chinese government arrested two Canadian citizens in Beijing four years ago, just days after Canada had detained Meng Wanzhou, a top executive in the Chinese tech firm Huawei, in line with a U.S. extradition request. The Canadians were held for nearly three years, until the U.S. Justice Department reached a “deferred prosecution” deal with Ms. Meng, allowing her, and the Canadians, to return home.

And despite Mr. Biden’s efforts to include Mr. Whelan in last week’s deal, Russia conditioned his release on a Bout-size ransom from another ally, Germany. Moscow wanted the release of Vadim Krasikov, serving a life sentence for the murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin in 2021 – something both the United States and Germany evidently agreed was a non-starter.

So in the end, if Ms. Griner was to be spared nine years in a Siberian penal colony, the choice that President Biden felt he was left with was stark: the Viktor Bout deal, or no deal at all.

That may, of course, be a powerful argument for choosing no deal. Many commentators in recent days, not just Mr. Biden’s political opponents, have suggested that’s what he should have done.

Yet perhaps the most powerful argument on the other side – for deciding to take even an imperfect deal in order to free even one captive citizen – rests on a tenet embedded not only in democracy, but in many religious faiths too.

It is a belief that helps distinguish democracies from regimes like Russia’s: that human beings are not mere commodities; that each person has fundamental rights, and fundamental value.