For the last half century, the U.S. government’s official policy for responding to the kidnapping of Americans overseas for political purposes has been to refuse to negotiate. The policy dates back to 1973, when eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September overran the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, and took hostage several foreign diplomats, including two Americans. Asked by reporters for his response, President Richard Nixon declared that “we will not pay blackmail.” Within hours, the two American diplomats, along with a Belgian colleague, were stood up against a basement wall and shot.

President Ronald Reagan also proclaimed he would never “make concessions to terrorists” but did so in secret, most notably when he made a deal to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for help in freeing U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The “no-concessions” policy, as it became known, was eventually codified in a classified directive at the beginning of the George W. Bush Administration. The underlying rationale was that paying ransom would encourage more hostage-taking while providing a source of funding to terror groups.

The no-concessions policy hardened as Al Qaeda used the kidnapping of Americans and Europeans as a way to garner publicity and funds. While European governments, such as France, Spain, and Italy, quietly paid multimillion-dollar ransoms to free their citizens, the U.S. Patriot Act, passed in 2001, specifically banned the provision of material support to designated terror groups, including ransom payments made by private parties, like corporations and families. For the next fifteen years, the United States and the United Kingdom became the leading adherents to the no-concessions framework.

Beginning in 2012, as ISIS began to acquire territory in Syria, its members kidnapped dozens of Westerners, among them aid workers and journalists. ISIS exploited the disparity between the European approach of quietly paying ransoms and the American and British policy of declining to do so. While the Europeans paid millions in ransom to bring their hostages home, British and American hostages, among them the journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, were murdered. The families of American hostages were angry with the Obama Administration, which they felt had abandoned them at their time of greatest need. Their complaints compelled President Barack Obama to order a review of U.S. hostage policy, which was completed in the summer of 2015.

The new hostage policy kept the no-concessions framework in place but created a more robust interagency system to support families and coördinate the government response. It provided some additional latitude, making clear that the U.S. government could “communicate” with hostage-takers even if it couldn’t negotiate. In order to calm fears among families, Obama assured them that no Americans had been or would be prosecuted for paying a ransom to a terrorist group despite the fact that such payments were technically illegal.

President Trump has taken a very different approach to the issue. He has kept in place the expanded effort created by Obama to support families but repeatedly pushed the boundaries of the no-concessions policy upheld by Republican and Democratic Presidents since Nixon. Trump’s style of resolving cases is more personal and more flexible. Obama was focussed on the strategic challenges around hostage-taking, and tended to avoid personal interest or involvement. If an American President showed a personal interest in bringing a hostage home, the theory went, it would raise the value of American hostages and increase the number of kidnappings. Trump, by contrast, has gone out of his way to highlight his personal engagement in hostage-recovery efforts, welcoming hostages home on national television or inviting them to Oval Office photo opportunities. Trump seeks to showcase his skill as a deal maker and gain the political benefit of bringing Americans home.

Peter Bergen, a vice-president of the Washington, D.C.-based New America think tank who has written widely on terrorism, called Trump’s hostage efforts “an area of significant foreign-policy success” and highlighted the role of Robert O’Brien, who served as the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs before being named national-security adviser, last September. Last year, Trump—citing a statement made by O’Brien—said his Administration had brought home thirty-eight Americans held captive abroad, ranging from the 2017 rescue of Caitlan Coleman and her family, held for five years by the Taliban in Pakistan, to the 2018 release of the American pastor Andrew Brunson, unjustly imprisoned by Turkey on charges of collaborating with a coup. “The President has had unparalleled success in bringing Americans home without paying concessions, without prisoner exchanges,” O’Brien said, “but through force of will and the good will that he’s generated around the world.”

Some advocates for hostages say the Administration is inflating the number of prisoners brought home and paying de-facto ransoms in cases. Trump, for example, takes credit for the release of Americans whom past Administrations would not have considered hostages, including three U.C.L.A. basketball players arrested by China for shoplifting, and the rapper A$AP Rocky, who was arrested in Sweden after he got into an altercation on the street. The Administration is also increasingly engaging in prisoner exchanges with insurgents and terrorist groups .

In November, 2019, two hostages held by the Taliban for more than three years in Afghanistan, the American Kevin King and the Australian Timothy Weeks, were released as part of a deal that included the freeing of three senior Taliban leaders held in Afghan jails. Administration officials said the hostage release was part of a broader effort by U.S. diplomats to secure a peace deal with the Taliban. (In an apparent setback, an American contractor, Mark R. Frerichs, was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan last month, according to Newsweek.)

In Iran, the Trump Administration claims it negotiated the release of the Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang in exchange for an Iranian scientist, Masoud Soleimani, who was imprisoned in the U.S. for sanctions violations. These deals appear to defy the no-concessions policy, particularly considering that the Trump Administration designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which often controls American prisoners in Iran, as a foreign terrorist organization. Six Americans—most of them dual Iranian nationals—are still imprisoned in Iran.

Diane Foley, the mother of James Foley and president and founder of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for the release of all Americans held hostage overseas (and on whose board Bergen sits), recognized Trump’s efforts. But she called the President’s record “uneven,” citing the Administration’s unwillingness to confront U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where an American citizen, Mustafa Kassem, recently died after more than six years in custody.

Trump has earned praise from other hostage families. He made a personal call to Carl and Marsha Mueller, the parents of the humanitarian-aid worker Kayla Mueller, who was kidnapped and murdered by ISIS in Syria, to inform them about the military operation that had killed the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which had been named in their daughter’s honor. At the President’s invitation, the Muellers attended the State of the Union address on Tuesday and, in one of the few moments of bipartisan unity, received a standing ovation from the entire Congress. The family of the journalist Austin Tice, who has been missing in Syria for more than seven years, has also publicly praised Trump for his efforts to bring Tice home. At a January 27th press conference, Austin’s mother, Debra Tice, alleged that an unnamed senior U.S. official was defying President Trump’s desire to win her son’s release by refusing to meet with Syrian officials.