A Devil of a Deal

We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!
~Rudyard Kipling

1904 was a presidential election year in the United States—and the political convention of the incumbent party was being held in Chicago. That May, a pair of globetrotting Greek-American expats, Ion Perdicaris and his stepson, were taken hostage from their villa in Tangier, Morocco, by a band of rifle-toting Berber tribesmen on horseback. The bandits’ chieftain Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli demanded a hefty ransom from the Sultan of Morocco in exchange for the prisoners’ release. 

But Theodore Roosevelt, a US president always keen to marshal American power on the world stage, saw an opportunity to employ his famous “big stick.” With characteristic pugnacity, he avowed: “We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!” Seven battleships from the Atlantic fleet were swiftly dispatched to the Moroccan coast. It was hoped, as Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris puts it, that “some 30,000 tons of American gunmetal should soon persuade the sultan to start negotiating.” However, American officials quickly became disheartened by the bandits’ obstinacy. “I hope they may not murder Mr. Perdicaris, but a nation cannot degrade itself to prevent ill-treatment of a citizen,” secretary of state John Hay lamented.

It turned out that Perdicaris had long ago renounced his US citizenship. But this discovery did not greatly concern Roosevelt, who contended that Raisuli had taken Perdicaris hostage in the belief that he was an American, so the nation’s honour was still at stake. The captive couldn’t simply be left to his fate. The intense outside pressure on the sultan finally bore fruit, and Perdicaris was released in exchange for a large ransom paid by the Moroccan authorities and kept secret by the Roosevelt administration.

Plus ça change…

On 1 August, Russia released over a dozen unjustly detained journalists, dissidents, and democracy activists in exchange for a coterie of Russian spies and criminals as part of what the Wall Street Journal has called the “largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.” This time, however, the cost to US honour and national security was not hidden; it was openly acknowledged as the price of doing business in a fallen world, and accepted, with some misgivings, by those who welcomed the deal.