The Princeton Historian Mugged by Reality

[Nevilledog]

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Jeffrey Goldberg
@JeffreyGoldberg
"Forty months as a hostage was ample time for Wang to revise his opinion of the Iranian government.'

Fascinating piece from @gcaw:

The Princeton Historian Mugged by Reality
Since being freed from Iranian detention, Xiyue Wang has been unrelenting in his criticism of the authoritarian country—and some American elites’ attempt at rapprochement.
theatlantic.com
1:36 PM · Mar 17, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/story-xiyue-wang-iran-graduate-student-hostage/618298/

On December 7, 2019, an American graduate student named Xiyue Wang was freed after 40 months in an Iranian prison. His captors roused him in his cell early that morning and put him on a plane to Zurich. The Swiss had offered to mediate a trade for Masoud Soleimani, an Iranian scientist arrested by the United States for violating sanctions against Iran. At the airport, the Iranian ambassador to Switzerland exchanged a few words with Wang in Persian and told him, “Well, at least you learned Persian in prison.” Wang, who considers his treatment by the Iranians to have been torture, was unsmiling. The ambassador then turned to address the Swiss and objected to Soleimani’s arrest. Wang was meant to keep silent, but instead asserted his right of reply, unexpectedly, in French. “Excuse me,” he said, acidly. “But I did nothing wrong. I went to Iran to do research with the permission of the Foreign Ministry, but Iranian intelligence arrested me and forced me into confessing that I was a spy.” The Iranian ambassador was taken aback. “It seems Mr. Wang has not only learned Persian in prison,” a Swiss diplomat observed, “but French as well.”

Since then, Wang has persisted in his refusal to shut up. Long-term hostages who make it home physically intact tend to follow one of two models. The first is to try to pick up life where it stopped—to go back to family (Wang is married and has a son, whom he did not see from ages 3 to 6) and try to keep the ordeal from defining you. The other is to throw oneself into the identity of an ex-hostage, and speak loudly about lessons learned and knowledge gained. Now back in the United States, Wang has reunited with his family and resumed his doctoral studies at Princeton, but otherwise he has chosen the latter path. On Twitter, he is almost compulsively responsive to potential shifts in Iran policy. Because Iran and the United States have had no diplomatic relations for more than 40 years, virtually no Americans—including those working on Iran policy in the U.S. government—have significant experience in the country. Whenever there is a hint of a change in President Joe Biden’s policy or personnel working on Iran, one can rely on Wang to give his view, confidently but rarely stridently, informed by 40 months of involuntary fieldwork.

The Biden administration has signaled a willingness to unfreeze relations with Iran—to revisit the Obama-era nuclear deal, which the Trump administration halted. Wang used to think rapprochement was a good idea, and he even told his Iranian interrogators so. They accused him of trying to subvert the Iranian government from within. “I was fucking stupid,” Wang told me. “Unbelievably stupid. If I could go back, I would slap myself.” He now argues that the United States should patiently inflict pain on the Iranian government militarily and economically. “The Iranian regime is stalling for leverage,” he said. Once it is weakened and beggared, negotiation can begin.

Wang is an unusual man. Born in Beijing, he came to the United States at the age of 20 and naturalized in 2009. He studied South Asia as an undergraduate at the University of Washington and learned Hindi living in India. He studied Central Asia in graduate school at Harvard; worked for the Red Cross in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for a year; and finally landed in a doctoral program in history at Princeton in 2013, with a Sovietist named Stephen Kotkin as his adviser. “Kotkin has a tendency to admit unconventional students” with knowledge of multiple languages and regions, Wang said. These students are dispatched “like guerrilla fighters” to work on historical topics that would escape the attention of historians who have only a single focus.

*snip*

[efhmc]

1. We should read this and use Wang's horrible experience to shape our understanding of Iran.