Grappling with an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy at home, the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to assert itself beyond its borders. Its "hostage diplomacy," a policy of using foreign prisoners to extract concessions from the West, is in full operation. The latest example of this is the agreement reached with the United States mediated by Qatar. On the verge of implementation, the agreement involves a prisoner swap as well as the release of $6 billion of Iranian funds, frozen in South Korea due to US sanctions.
On September 11, Washington announced it was putting in place exemptions to assure the banks involved in this money transfer that they would not be placed under sanctions. These were reimposed in 2018 after the United States' unilateral exit from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The $6 billion, which are to be transferred to Qatari banks, are intended to be used to buy food and medicine.
For its part, Tehran released five Iranian-American prisoners from Evin prison, north of Tehran, and placed them under house arrest on August 10. They will be exchanged for five Iranians "imprisoned" in the United States. Of these, four were tried in US courts and sentenced to prison for violating sanctions against Tehran's nuclear program, or for attempting to send sensitive equipment or provide military information to Iran.
This group includes Kaveh Afrasiabi, a professor of international relations at Boston University in Massachusetts. For the past four years, he has been accused of "propaganda" and "lobbying" in favor of the Iranian regime, without having legally declared his activity as a lobbyist, a requirement in the United States. He categorically denies this. In an interview with BBC Persian, broadcast in Persian from London, he thanked the Islamic Republic of Iran and announced his intention to stay in the United States.
In addition to the five Iranian-American hostages, Iran acknowledged on September 12 that it had been holding Johan Floderus, a Swedish national working in the European diplomatic service, since April 2022. The Iranian judiciary announced that the 33-year-old is accused of "committing crimes" in Iran, without giving further details. Floderus joins a dozen other Westerners detained in Iran. Other countries affected include Germany and France, with five prisoners, including Franco-Iranian anthropologist Fariba Adelkhah and teacher and trade unionist Cécile Kohler.
In addition to raw power, there is a desire to break with years of isolation. This can be seen by Tehran's involvement in various forums designed to counterbalance an international order still dominated by the United States and the West. At the end of August, Tehran's application to join the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa) was accepted. A month earlier, the Islamic Republic of Iran had joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which brings together the major Asian powers. To everyone's surprise, in March, Tehran also signed a peace deal with its old regional adversary, Saudi Arabia. The two countries reopened their respective embassies, closed in early 2016 in the wake of the attack on Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran.
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