MS. SHERMAN: Thank you, Jason. It’s good to be with you. It’s particularly good to be with you in Washington D.C., rather than you being in a prison cell in Tehran.
MR. REZAIAN: Before we begin, I think it’s worth noting that Deputy Secretary Sherman is joining us today in her diplomatic capacity and I in a journalistic one, but we share a unique backstory. As many of you might know, when I was the bureau chief for The Post in Tehran, I was wrongfully detained for 544 days. During much of that time, Deputy Secretary Sherman was the lead negotiator in ongoing negotiations between the U.S., Iran, and other world powers over Iran’s nuclear program, and had a lot to do with efforts to bring me home. So, this is personal for both of us. And I’m really excited to have you on the program today.
MS. SHERMAN: Thank you. Great to be with you.
MR. REZAIAN: So I want to start by asking a question about the recent executive order around hostage and wrongful detentions that President Biden announced over the summer. He declared this a national emergency. Why now? What’s changed in recent months or years that has made this such a critical issue?
MS. SHERMAN: I think we’ve seen governments use hostage taking as a tool, as a weapon to leverage things from the United States of America. And the president, just like Secretary Blinken, understands in a very powerful way what this means for families when their loved ones are taken in this way, when they are wrongfully detained. You know, the United States has a responsibility to care for American citizens wherever they are in the world, whether they lose their passport and need help, whether they find themselves in legal jeopardy, or if they find themselves wrongfully detained and a number of other circumstances as well. That is a fundamental responsibility of the United States.
But the president, in addition, just feels in the most heartfelt way that he has to do everything he can to bring Americans home who are wrongfully detained. I think most people know because it’s in the press that he’s meeting today, in fact, with the family of Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, to talk with them about our ongoing efforts to bring them home from Russia. And so the president wants to do everything possible, and Secretary Blinken does as well. So, this executive order was a way to give the administration new tools to have the whole of government approach to use everything we have possible to ensure that we get every single American home who has been unjustly detained.
MR. REZAIAN: Just yesterday, I was up on the Hill giving testimony to members of Congress on this very issue. And you talk about the whole of government approach. As the caseload increases, more and more members of Congress have constituents who have been affected by this–dozens currently, and probably, you know, more than 150 or so over the past few years. So, I do think that there is a rising consciousness around this issue that we haven’t seen before.
But one of the things that President Biden wrote in the executive order is that this is an economic and a national security threat. I think previously we always thought of this as a personal problem that affects a handful of Americans. But talk about the geopolitical dimensions of this and the challenges of balancing those two aspects of it.
MS. SHERMAN: Well, as you know, Jason, one of the things that Secretary Blinken has done is to create what we call a “D” indicator in our travel advisories to Americans who are traveling abroad. We have nine risk indicators…
Read More: Transcript: Wendy R. Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State
