* Far less successful was the case of Kevin King, who, along with his Australian colleague Timothy Weeks, was kidnapped in 2016 from the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul where they both were professors. In captivity, King, who was sixty when he was kidnapped, had significant health problems. The Haqqanis realized that a dead hostage was no good to them. Taliban officials based in Doha, Qatar, contacted senior Qatari officials to tell them they were ready to make a deal for King. Qatari officials relayed this to the National Security Council in March 2018, but a deal didn’t materialize and King remained in captivity until November 2019.

On April 26, 2019, Trump tweeted “ ‘. . . Donald J. Trump is the greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States. 20 hostages, many in impossible circumstances, have been released in last two years. No money was paid.’ Cheif [sic] Hostage Negotiator, USA!” The Trump administration’s record of freeing Americans held hostage by terrorist groups or unjustly detained by despotic regimes such as North Korea was certainly something the president could celebrate. One such success was the release of Coleman and Boyle and their children. So was the release of American citizens Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak-song, and Kim Sang Duk, who were all held by the North Korean regime on arbitrary charges for more than a year and were released in May 2018 as a result of the negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program between the Trump administration and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un.

The Trump administration did prioritize the return of American hostages. It also benefited from institutions that were created during the Obama administration, which helped to better focus US government efforts to free hostages. The Obama administration was criticized for its feckless response when ISIS was holding four American hostages in Syria in 2014, including the freelance journalist James Foley. A US government official threatened the Foley family with possible prosecution if they tried to raise money for a ransom for their son’s release because it was against the law to give money to a terrorist group. European countries routinely negotiated with terrorist groups and paid ransom, as a result of which their citizens were twice as likely to be released than American hostages.

After ISIS murdered James Foley in August 2014, his family lobbied for a better outcome for other families. In part because of the efforts of the Foleys, in 2015 the Obama administration founded the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell to better coordinate efforts across all the various government agencies, such as the FBI and State Department, that work to free hostages. A presidential envoy on hostages was also appointed at the State Department so that the issue now had a primary advocate there. Those institutions continued to do their work under the Trump administration, and as a result, during the first two years of the Trump administration twenty hostages and unjustly held detainees were released.