Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

If you could pose one earnest question to any of the Republican candidates, what would it be? (No insults disguised as questions allowed.)

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

On Wednesday, the Republican Party held a presidential primary debate. Eight candidates attended: North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, former Vice President Mike Pence, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. Donald Trump, who did not attend, is leading all polls by a wide margin.

Here’s the political scientist Seth Masket’s reaction to the event:

The debate did what it was supposed to do, which was tease out the differences among the candidates for the sake of the viewing audience. Vivek Ramaswamy calling climate change a hoax while Nikki Haley says it’s real but we need to pressure China to do more is a useful data point for voters who care about that issue. Pence calling for “leadership” on restricting abortion while other candidates called for consensus was also useful. The disagreements about Ukraine were vast and notable … You could also get a good sense of just where the party is when the subject of Trump came up. The median position seemed to be that Trump had done wrong on January 6th, Pence had done right, that it would be better for the country if Trump weren’t the nominee, but that, for at least six of them, this wasn’t a dealbreaker and they’d still support Trump over Joe Biden.

Here’s Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review:

Much of the night was a beguiling peek into an alternate reality where Donald Trump isn’t running for president. But no matter how nice it was to hear talented Republicans (mostly) discuss things other than Donald Trump, the sad fact is if he had been there he likely would have completely dominated the stage.

And Noah Rothman, also writing at National Review:

The former president did not take up much of the field’s attention on the debate stage—outside the segment focused exclusively on Trump’s legal peril, he felt like an afterthought. That unfamiliar condition will be shattered by tomorrow afternoon when Trump will surrender to authorities in Georgia to be arraigned. Twenty-four hours from now, the most famous mug shot in American criminal history will already be finding its way onto t-shirts and social-media profiles, and this brief window into an alternative universe in which Trump is no longer the dominant force in American political life will feel like a distant memory.

Donald Trump and the Presidency: A Bad Combination

In lieu of appearing on Wednesday’s debate stage, Trump gave an interview to Tucker Carlson, who asked as his final question, “Do you think we’re moving toward civil war?”

Trump answered by talking without apparent remorse about the day that his supporters stormed the Capitol.

This exchange ensued:

Trump: There’s tremendous passion, and there’s tremendous love. You know, January 6 was a very interesting day, because they don’t report it properly. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken [to] before … and people who were in that crowd, a very, very small group of people––and we said patriotically and peacefully, peacefully and patriotically, right? Nobody ever says that, go peacefully and patriotically––but people that were in that crowd that day, a very small group of people, went down there, and then there were a lot of scenarios that we can talk about.

But people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced. There was love in that crowd. There was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit, and such passion, and such love. And I’ve also never seen, simultaneously and from the same people, such hatred of what they’ve done to our country.

Carlson: So do you think it’s possible that there’s open conflict? We seem to be moving toward something.

Trump: I don’t know, I don’t know, because I don’t know what it––you know, I can say this: There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. And that’s probably a bad combination.

That bad combination is what Trump brings out in Americans: passion and hatred. When that is a politician’s demonstrated effect as a leader, it follows that reelecting him would be foolhardy. Patriotic Republicans should nominate someone who doesn’t evoke hatred in their fellow citizens.

A Perilous Moment

At Notes From the Middleground, Damon Linker, who abhors Trump, warns against certain efforts to stop him:

On the one hand, I think there should be severe consequences for defying the peaceful transfer of power that is a hallmark of America’s centuries-long experiment in self-government. On the other hand, I also think that what we call “the rule of law” is founded in a paradox that could well be exploded by prosecuting a man with a decent shot of winning the highest elected office in the land.

Allow me to explain.

The rule of law and its advocates claim that it resides above the political fray, serving as the rules that dispassionately apply to all citizens equally, regardless of political conviction. Or put in somewhat different terms, the rule of law and its advocates claim it is prior to politics, or that it’s the foundation on which politics rests. Yet in truth, the rule of law is not prior to politics. It is not the foundation on which politics rests. Politics comes first. We made the law, we can change it, and we can reject its legitimacy. The last of these happened in 1776.

Then there are cases in which we are fundamentally divided about whether the law and those empowered to enforce it are doing the job well. This is how I put it in a post I wrote just after Trump’s third indictment.

Federal law wasn’t handed down on Mount Sinai. [Special counsel Jack] Smith doesn’t hold tablets in his hands backed up by a divine pillar of fire. The law and the institutions of its enforcement receive their power from their perceived legitimacy. If an overwhelming majority of the country accepts that legitimacy, we have the rule of law. If an overwhelming majority of the country denies that legitimacy, we are ripe for revolution. As it is, the country has two major political parties. One of them strongly affirms the legitimacy of what Smith is doing. The other party does not.

What strikes me about a number of my friends and colleagues in the liberal center-left and center-right is how oblivious they are to this dimension of our current situation—and just how dangerous it is. They are so convinced Trump is a criminal, so convinced he’s deserving of punishment, and so convinced that the rule of law as they construe it is legitimate that they appear not to realize (or care?) that under these conditions the attempt to vindicate the rule of law could end up shredding it far more fully than Trump alone ever could—and could even end up sundering the polity.

The most oblivious of all are those making and promoting the argument that Article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, written in the aftermath of the Civil War to prevent Confederate officials from holding office, automatically renders Trump (post-January 6) ineligible to run for or serve as president. Ross Douthat did a nice job in a recent column of sorting through the various legal arguments surrounding the proposal before turning to a final prudential consideration that aligns precisely with my own thinking:

The idea that the best way to deal with a demagogic populist whose entire appeal is already based on disillusionment with the established order is for state officials—in practice, state officials of the opposing political party—to begin unilaterally excluding him from their ballots on the basis of their own private judgment of crimes that he has not been successfully prosecuted for … I’m sorry, the mind reels.

It sure does … What this reading of the Constitution amounts to is a pretty egregious proposal for political disenfranchisement. …

If vast swaths of both parties had acted to ban Trump from serving in public office again at the conclusion of his second impeachment trial in February 2021, that would have been one thing. It would have been an expression of bipartisan consensus, which, truthfully, is the only foundation the rule of law ever has. But Democratic Party officials and a small handful of Federalist Society law profs cannot do the same thing on their own several years later. They simply can’t—because they lack the requisite authority and legitimacy to pull it off.

Provocation of the Week

In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan argues that the Hunter Biden story will spell trouble for Democrats:

In the old understanding of the Hunter story, a druggy sex addict recorded his adventures on a mislaid laptop. An embarrassment, but every family has one. The emerging Hunter story is different in nature. It is: This guy was actually good at something, being a serious influence peddler and wiring things so he never got caught …

In May and late July two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers, Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler, put their careers on the line in congressional testimony. It was credible; they were impressive. They said the IRS had impeded its own investigation of Hunter Biden’s income and its sources, including from overseas business dealings. Mr. Ziegler said the investigation was “limited and marginalized” by Justice Department officials. Mr. Shapley told CBS News that his efforts to follow money trails that involved “dad” or “the big guy,” Hunter’s euphemisms for his father, were blocked by the Justice Department.

Also in late July, in federal court in Wilmington, Del., the plea bargain deal blew up. It dealt with tax and gun-possession charges against Hunter. Judge Maryellen Noreika told federal prosecutors and defense attorneys to go back and try again, the deal didn’t look normal and she wasn’t there to “rubber-stamp” it …

Another thing breaking through: when speaking of Hunter Biden, people use language like “the president’s troubled son.” There’s always the sense he’s a kid, that he tragically lost his mother as a child, had a troubled adolescence as the younger, less impressive son.

Hunter Biden is 53. At that age some men are grandfathers. He was doing business with Ukrainian and Chinese companies not as a wayward 25-year-old but as a middle-aged man. An age when adults are fully responsible for their actions.

Here is the unexpected political turn in the story. The president’s calling card to middle America has always been “middle class Joe,” the family man from Scranton, a normal guy of a certain assumed dignity who lived, as he said, on his salary, and who had known personal tragedy. Fully true or not, that was his political positioning, and it served him well. But the Hunter story is threatening to shift his father’s public reputation into Clinton territory—the sense that things are sketchily self-seeking, too interested in money. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because of that aspect of her political reputation.

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The first time I saw Siamak Namazi was while I was in my cell in Evin Prison, in Tehran. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the longest-held American hostage in Iran was being kept only a few hundred meters away from where I crouched on stained and threadbare carpet, my eyes fixed on a dusty wall-mounted television screen. I didn’t understand Farsi back then, but I knew Amrika, and had come to recognise the word jasoos, too, given the abandon with which the term was thrown about the interrogation room.

This gaunt, bookish-looking man on my screen, whose hollow eyes flitted toward the camera every few seconds—he was supposed to be “America’s top spy”?

I was more incredulous still when the narrator cut to footage of an elderly man with wispy white hair and a kind face: Baquer Namazi. Suspenseful music played over dramatically backlit images of father and son posing with flags and symbols of the Great Satan. The bold and noble Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had captured two dangerous American infiltrators, bravely rescuing Iran from an ungodly, diabolical plot.

[Read: Iran has become a prison]

Part of me wanted to groan, or roll my eyes, or even laugh. But I had learned to be wary. I felt a deep disquiet seep into my gut. The Namazis’ charges were ludicrous, but they were also deadly serious. In a place like Iran, people are routinely executed for less.

The first time I saw Morad Tahbaz was through the back window of a meeting room attached to the prison duty officer’s station. Tahbaz was the first defendant in a group case involving Iran’s premier environmental-conservation NGO, and two of his co-defendants were my cellmates. They had told me that Tahbaz had been moved from the men’s section of our IRGC-controlled interrogation unit to what was referred to as “the villa,” a self-contained room with a small garden annex where the IRGC prefers to keep long-term prisoners, such as the Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. The conditions were supposed to be better there, and as a British American, Tahbaz was one of the IRGC’s highest-value prisoners. I watched Tahbaz pace listlessly around a narrow, paved courtyard, stopping to inspect a leafy potted plant before retreating back inside. He was rumoured to have survived cancer while in custody. Even back then, in 2019, there were murmurs of a deal to secure his freedom—a deal that never materialised, until now.  

From my chats with low-level IRGC functionaries, I understood there to be a ranking of sorts as to which foreign prisoners fetch the highest price. Complete foreigners are generally more valuable than dual-nationals. Western Europe is better than Eastern Europe is better than Japan. The Chinese whisk their citizens away in a matter of months; detainees from the developing world can expect to serve their sentences in full. Americans and Israelis are the most expensive hostages to extract, and are therefore the most coveted.

“At least you’re not an American” was a phrase I’d sometimes hear from Iranian political prisoners trying to encourage me not to lose hope. As an Australian researcher arrested after being invited to attend an academic conference in Iran, I was lower down the value chain than Siamak Namazi or Morad Tahbaz, but my freedom was still considered worthy of significant concessions. I served two years and three months in two Iranian prisons before being exchanged in a prisoner swap for three convicted IRGC terrorists held in Thailand. Like Namazi, Tahbaz, and a third American hostage, Emad Shargi, who are reportedly on the cusp of being freed under an agreement between the United States and Iran, I had received a 10-year sentence for the wholly unsubstantiated charge of espionage.

Dealmaking with the Islamic Republic is a grubby business, albeit one that is becoming normalized given the sheer frequency with which Iran is now resorting to hostage-taking to achieve foreign-policy, or even budgetary, objectives. Hostage diplomacy is on the rise worldwide, as the global rules-based order is buffeted by a resurgent authoritarianism coupled with the growing international perception of a United States in decline. Iran is one of its most egregious perpetrators, and so far Tehran has been able to simultaneously defy both international human-rights principles and basic laws of economics in commanding higher and higher prices for a proliferation of foreign hostages held in its prisons.

Namazi, Tahbaz, and Shargi are the public faces of the latest iteration of Iran’s lucrative hostage-taking enterprise, which has reportedly secured the Islamic Republic both a prisoner exchange, involving Iranian nationals held in American prisons, and the transfer of $6 billion in Iranian funds frozen in South Korean banks under sanctions. This is the second cash-for-hostages deal between Iran and the United States this century. The first involved $1.7 billion in frozen assets from a historical arms purchase, which the Obama administration transferred in 2016 in conjunction with the certification of the JCPOA nuclear deal, and contingent upon the release, officially, of four American citizens, including Rezaian. A similar deal was reached between Iran and the U.K. in 2022, in which a historical military debt of £400 million was transferred to Tehran in exchange for two British Iranian hostages.

Every time a hostage is freed, those of us who have survived Iran’s prison system collectively rejoice. We are a surprisingly large cohort, and our numbers swell further as Iran’s hostage-taking grows bolder and more blatant. Namazi, Tahbaz, Shargi, and two other Americans whose names have not been released have been removed from prison and placed under house arrest, in anticipation of the second phase of the deal: The arrival of the $6 billion into a Qatari bank account. The Qataris will ostensibly act as guarantors to ensure that the Iranians use these funds only for humanitarian purposes.

Such provisions should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism, however. Nothing is preventing Iran from, for example, moving the equivalent of $6 billion from school and hospital funding across to the military or the IRGC, before plugging the gap with the South Korean money. Although our community of former Iran hostages is thrilled that five innocent Americans are soon to be freed, many of us have felt compelled to speak out against any deal that might conceivably incentivize Iran’s hostage-taking further.  

I remember the moment I was released from Evin as though it was yesterday: A flurry of bureaucracy, last-minute taunts from my IRGC captors, a furtive final glance at the gray and soulless courtyard at the entrance of the interrogation unit. Being forced to stand in front of the gates of Evin to film a bizarre interview, excerpts from which would make it into a 15-minute-long propaganda clip that aired on that evening’s news broadcast. The IRGC’s opulent private hangar at Mehrabad airport. Squeezing the Australian ambassador’s hand goodbye as she led me up the stairs to board the plane that would spirit me out of Iranian airspace. And finally, the feeling that I could breathe deeply again, for the first time in nearly two and a half years.

I am overjoyed for Namazi, Tahbaz, Shargi, and the others. I know that all five of them right now are probably tempering their elation with pragmatism, warning themselves not to be seduced by false hope. One year into my incarceration, I was left behind in a prisoner-swap deal that saw two Australian backpackers released from Evin. I know that the American hostages will be reminding themselves that nothing is over until it’s actually over. Namazi and Tahbaz have also felt the pain of being left behind: $1.7 billion was not enough to buy Namazi’s freedom in 2016, and Tahbaz, also a British national, was left out of last year’s £400 million deal with the U.K. I can’t speak for what they are feeling, but I suspect they would be aghast to know that, in spite of the eye-watering sum of money involved, the current deal will once again leave U.S. nationals behind.

Late last month, when news of a new American hostage deal began circulating, it was reported that U.S. negotiators had angered their Iranian counterparts by seeking to add one additional American to the deal at the last minute. The families of two U.S. permanent residents, considered U.S. nationals under the 2020 Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, had been campaigning vocally for their loved ones’ inclusion. One of these, Virginia resident Shahab Dalili, was reported in Iranian media to be the unnamed American. Dalili has already served seven years of a 10-year sentence, yet his family has been waiting for the State Department to formally grant him “wrongfully detained” status since 2019. Although such a designation is not a requirement for the U.S. government to negotiate a prisoner’s release, it elevates the management of the detainee’s case to the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA), which is explicitly tasked with bringing Americans home. Under the Levinson Act, permanent residents as well as citizens are eligible for SPEHA representation.

Similarly, the lawyer of California resident Jamshid Sharmahd applied to the State Department for a wrongful-detention designation within a month of Sharmahd’s shocking abduction by IRGC agents from Dubai International Airport in July 2020. The Sharmahd family is still awaiting the U.S. government’s decision, in spite of the fact that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that Jamshid was a victim of arbitrary detention back in April 2022 and called for his immediate release. He was a legal resident of the United States for almost 20 years and is owed protection under the Levinson Act, but the State Department continues to deflect responsibility onto Germany, where he holds citizenship. Sharmahd has been sentenced to death in Iran and could be executed at any moment.

We know that Dalili has heard of the deal, because he has already recounted his anguish at being left out of it to his family on the phone from Evin Prison. This is a kind of despair that eats away at you from inside. You feel abandoned and worthless; you see year after pointless year stretching out before you on an endless loop; you find that your carefully cultivated and closely guarded will to go on has somehow evaporated.

That some hostages are simply more valuable than others has long been the case. Just ask former Marine Paul Whelan, who has been left behind twice now in American prisoner swaps with Russia, and might even suffer this fate a third time as the State Department negotiates with Moscow over the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. The feeling that you are one of the unimportant ones, that someone has judged your freedom not worth whatever resources must be expended—this pain diminishes even the pure elation of eventually gaining one's liberty.

The public outcry against the current deal, particularly from the Iranian American community as well as among Iranians themselves, has in my mind been largely justified. The United States has long been resolute in refusing to negotiate with non-state-actor hostage-takers, including terrorist groups, yet has found itself led down a slippery slope by a notoriously slippery Iranian regime whose hostage-taking apparatus is dominated by the IRGC, which is itself a proscribed terrorist organization. The exchange of $1.7 billion for four hostages in 2016 has become $6 billion for five hostages in 2023, yet in spite of the enormous markup, U.S. nationals are still being left behind. What is worse, Iran emerges from this deal further emboldened and motivated to take yet more hostages, perhaps in exchange for other large sums of sanctioned money frozen abroad in places such as Japan.

Six billion dollars is an awfully large amount of money. It could cover a hell of a lot of arms shipped to Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Ansarullah. It could cover the salaries of thousands of Basij and IRGC militiamen, with additional bonuses for torturing, raping, and beating protesters. And it could keep the children of regime officials in overseas property and luxury goods for many lifetimes.

Cash-for-hostages deals encourage regimes like Iran’s to view innocent human lives as commodities that can be bought and traded for profit. Over the decades, the Islamic Republic has refined its hostage-taking business model into an extortion racket that is one of its most powerful foreign-policy levers. As long as countries like the United States are willing to acquiesce to its insatiable demands for ever-increasing sums of ransom, we can expect Iran to commodify a seemingly endless supply of hostages.

International cooperation is clearly necessary if Iran’s behaviour is to be curtailed in any systematic way. The Islamic Republic now targets the citizens of a wide array of Western nations; our governments should be on the same page as to how to respond when a citizen is taken, so that the approach of one country does not inadvertently undermine another’s. But even in the absence of such a multilateral accord, the United States can adopt a much stronger response than it has done.

Financial payments, regardless of where the funds come from, provide an incentive for hostage-taking, and as such they are fundamentally at odds with the U.S. government’s responsibility to ensure the security of its citizens. They are also a slap in the face to the brave people of Iran, many of whom are in the streets, risking their life to denounce the regime in the name of freedom, democracy, and gender equality—values that America professes to hold dear. The U.S. government should be no less steadfast in refusing to pay state-backed hostage-takers like the IRGC (a proscribed terrorist organisation) than it is when the Islamic State (also a proscribed terrorist organisation) or another non-state actor captures an American.

[Read: How to be a man in Iran]

The U.S. government needs to understand that Iran’s regime views conciliatory measures, such as declining to enforce sanctions, not as friendly gestures to smooth the path to negotiation, but as signals of weakness. Instead the United States should come up with a firm, punitive response to any further Iranian hostage-taking and announce this policy publicly, leaving the Islamic Republic no doubt as to America’s determination to follow through. Punishing and wide-ranging sanctions should be on the table, as should a crackdown on assets and visas for the family members of top regime officials, many thousands of whom live or study in the West. Such an approach could be modeled on the successful campaign targeting Russia’s oligarchs that followed the invasion of Ukraine. The United States should also press allied countries to follow its lead in listing the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.

We can welcome the release of Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz, Emad Shargi, and others, and at the same time call for an end to cash-for-hostages deals that reward and enrich nasty authoritarian regimes such as the Islamic Republic. Hostage diplomacy is a wicked conundrum that offers no clean solution: Every option available to diplomats is a bad one, and every action risks either consigning victims to indefinite suffering or creating new ones. The American way is not, nor should it be, to abandon innocent citizens detained overseas. Washington should continue to negotiate for its hostages abroad and to find creative ways to bring them home. But there should be no more cash bonanzas for hostage-takers, and punitive measures should be publicly and preemptively adopted to send a clear signal that in the future hostage diplomacy will be punished and discouraged, not tolerated and rewarded.

Chinese bid proposes nuclear plant near the border with Qatar and UAE, according to Wall Street Journal report.