Siamak Namazi picked up a phone last month from behind the walls of Evin Prison, where he has been held hostage by the Iranian regime since 2015. Speaking with CNN, exasperated, he begged President Joe Biden to "do what's necessary to end this nightmare." We know the pain he and other American hostages—Emad Shargi and Morad Tahbaz—are enduring and the brutality of their captors, as do tens of millions of Iranians. Washington is not unmoved, but it is unwilling to take the hard steps necessary to stop the Iranian regime from menacing innocent men, women, and children worldwide.
Over the last six months, the Iranian regime murdered more than 530 protesters. Thousands of others have met a similar fate over the previous 44 years, including hostages like Ruhollah Zam—a French resident and journalist—and Robert Levinson, an American citizen, whose family still waits to give him a proper burial.
Survivors are not left unscathed. Many will suffer devastating psychological trauma. Foreign and dual nationals held hostage undergo physical and psychological abuse, including denial of medical care, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and threats of mutilation, dismemberment, and execution. Iranians with the courage to stand in defiance of the regime face the possibility of beatings, electric shocks, rape, and other physical abuse in Iranian prisons. Amnesty International recently reported that not even children as young as 12 years old are off limits from these horrors.
From 1979 to 1981, one of the authors of this column—Barry Rosen—was subjected to violence and torture, including mock executions, while held hostage by the Iranian regime. Decades after his release, Rosen's profound post-traumatic stress disorder has grown more intense, just as psychiatrists at the Rhein-Main Air Base near Wiesbaden warned in 1981.
Some in Washington and many voters across the country, too, would prefer to think that Iran's behavior is not America's problem. They are wrong. Iran has made it our problem. Iran has plotted multiple bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations on U.S. soil in recent years against diplomats, bureaucrats, and journalists like this column's co-author—Masih Alinejad—a New Yorker now living in safe houses after being targeted for kidnapping and rendition to Iran, where she would likely be executed for opposing the regime's misogynistic compulsory hijab laws.
President Biden should live up to his promise to put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. That starts with recognizing that making the nuclear file the centerpiece of U.S. policy on Iran has been a mistake.
Tehran has used its nuclear program as an extortion racket to distract and deflect attention away from the full scope of its malign behavior. Human rights are moving up on the agenda, but there is far more work to be done. Now is the time for the U.S. to lead the world in ensuring the regime's economic and diplomatic isolation on the path to its inevitable demise.
Thankfully, a model for how to deal with the regime is already in place.
In the aftermath of the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in September 2021, many governments and international organizations have shunned the group and chosen to engage with a range of Afghan stakeholders, including civil society leaders and representatives of the country's various ethnic and religious groups. The U.S. is showing signs of moving in that direction with Iran.
U.S. officials stopped trying to negotiate indirectly with Iran over its nuclear program, led the effort to have Iran ousted from the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, and reaffirmed that the U.S. stands "with the courageous women and all citizens of Iran who right now are defying violence and repression to secure their basic rights" in meetings with activists.
More of those meetings are needed, more effort must be invested in rescuing hostages, and more care must be taken in seizing every opportunity to elevate the voices and profiles of dissidents. The vice president and secretary of state missed such an opportunity at the Munich Security Conference in February, where members of the Iranian opposition unity council were in attendance.
The State Department's Iran Action Group should focus on using America's diplomatic arsenal to pressure the regime and empower the Iranian people by impressing upon allies and partners the necessity of sending Iranian diplomats home, recalling their ambassadors, and blocking commerce with Tehran.
The Treasury Department should start fully enforcing U.S. sanctions against Iranian allies, like China, that help perpetuate the regime's abuses by purchasing billions of dollars of smuggled oil and providing Iran with surveillance technologies.
And President Biden should use the presidential bully pulpit to help Americans understand the scope of the Iranian threat to Americans, work across party lines to develop durable policies, and call on U.S. allies to sanction Iranian terror groups like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is primarily responsible for hostage-taking, transnational repression, crimes against humanity, and the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
In so doing, the U.S. stands a greater chance of ending the horrors that Siamak, Emad, and Morad are enduring, protecting innocent lives, and keeping the homeland safe from terror and the prospect of another American adversary being armed with nuclear weapons. But time is running out.
Barry Rosen is a survivor of the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, a senior adviser at United Against Nuclear Iran, and a founding member of Hostage Aid Worldwide.
Masih Alinejad is an Iranian journalist, author, and women's rights campaigner. A member of the Human Rights Foundation's International Council, she hosts Tablet, a talk show on Voice of America's Persian service.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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