For all the widespread fear of a second Donald Trump presidency, the Biden White House could be forgiven for being more preoccupied by the spectre of Jimmy Carter and the baleful images of his last year in office.
Carter was the last Democratic president to serve only a first term, brought low by the searing drama of the Tehran embassy siege, when Iranian revolutionaries had overrun the US diplomatic compound and held 52 American personnel captive for more than a year, heaping international humiliation on a military superpower when the cold war was still at its height.
Having made liberating the hostages a personal mission, Carter, then the leader of the free world, was reduced to a picture of baggy-eyed, cardigan-wearing impotence as the standoff wore on, destroying his re-election chances and paving the way for a landslide defeat at the hands of a buoyant Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Adding insult to injury, the president’s nemesis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ensured the hostages were not released until moments after he left office on Reagan’s inauguration day, to ensure that the ignominy was all Carter’s.
This memory is surely somewhere in the mind of Joe Biden as he seeks to fend off Republican attacks on the terms of the recent deal that led to the release of a new generation of Americans held hostage in Iran.
Siamak Namazi, Emad Sharghi, Morad Tahbaz and two others whose identities have not been disclosed, were freed on Monday as part of an agreement that saw proceedings dropped against five Iranians facing charges in the United States and – eye-catchingly – the unfreezing of $6bn of Iranian oil revenues that had been ensnared in the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policy against Tehran.
The words of an unnamed senior Biden administration official seemed to crystallise the Biden administration’s sensitivity on this last point.
“First, these are not taxpayer dollars,” he said, a comment aimed at dispelling any notion that the US was somehow paying a ransom fee to secure the release of its citizens.
But some Republicans made no secret of their criticism.
“Iran’s leaders will take the money and run. What on earth did Joe Biden think would happen?” wrote the Republican senator Tom Cotton on the social media network X, until recently known as Twitter, in response to comments by Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, that Iran would use money freed up by the agreement “wherever we need it”.
The White House has insisted that the money will only be available for “humanitarian transactions”, a position greeted by understandable scepticism.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, whose abandonment during his presidency of the nuclear agreement signed by the Obama administration prompted the freezing of the Iranian oil revenues, issued a characteristically scathing denunciation of the prisoner release deal on his Truth Social website.
“This absolutely ridiculous 6 Billion Dollar Hostage Deal with Iran has set a terrible PRECEDENT for the future,” he wrote. “Buckel [sic] up, you are going to see some terrible things start to happen. The 3 years ago highly respected USA has become a laughingstock all over the WORLD. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. VOTE TRUMP!!!”
His sentiments – if not his syntax – were echoed by the Republican congressman Pat Fallon on the social network X, formerly Twitter. “$6 billion for Iran in this prisoner exchange is just the latest example of Biden and Antony Blinken’s failed leadership on the world stage. No money for state sponsors of terrorism,” he wrote.
But at the heart of administration defensiveness may be different opposition: that among Iranian Americans to giving any kind of reward to a theocratic regime many of them bitterly oppose.
Awkwardly, that impression may have been reinforced by the words of one of the freed five, Siamak Namazi, who while expressing gratitude for his release from eight years of imprisonment after his plane landed in Doha, called for a drastically new approach to end state hostage taking as a foreign policy tool used by authoritarian governments.
“The Iranian regime has mastered the nasty game of caging innocent Americans and other foreign nationals, and commercialising their freedom,” he said. “It is only if the free world finally agrees to collectively impose draconian consequences on those who use human lives as mere bargaining chips, that the Iranian regime and its ilk will be compelled to make different choices.”
The alternative, he warned, is a future of more Americans and citizens of other western countries being held hostage.
Given the difficulty of “collectively” persuading government with diverging interests to mete out “draconian consequences”, it is little wonder that the White House has resorted to sternly warning its citizens against travelling to Iran, while imposing punitive measures against a former Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who now seems far removed from the corridors of power in the Islamic Republic.
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, put a brave gloss on things while addressing journalists at the state department on Monday, pointing out that the administration had successfully freed 30 detained Americans. He added: “We’re going to be working every single day to take steps to make this [detaining US citizens] more and more difficult and more and more of a burden on those countries that engage in it. And you’ll see in the days ahead here in New York, at the United Nations, our efforts to work with other countries to do just that.”
But the overall emphasis was on a tale of freedom. “For this moment, it’s very good to be able to say that our fellow citizens are free after enduring something that I think it would be difficult for any of us to imagine … and that in this moment, at least, I have something very joyful to report.”
Words the unfortunate Jimmy Carter was never able to utter.
