Welcome back to another entry of In Case You Wish You Missed It, the news you wish wouldn’t happen but, somehow, does.
After only hours of internment, the 10 U.S. sailors who found their way into the waters Iran Tuesday have been released by Iranian authorities. That’s right. For the first time in modern history, the words “hours,” “Iran,” and “released” have found themselves in the same sentence as fact, not hope.
Due to an alleged technical malfunction, two U.S. Navy patrol boats went off-course on a trip from Kuwait to Bahrain and came a bit to close to Iran-controlled Farsi Island and were corralled by Iranian forces, who took the 10 crew members in for questioning. Unlike the hostage crisis of 1980 and the internment of British naval crew members in 2004, this internment lasted hours, to the point that it could be filed as a non-news item.
But hours was all it took for presidential hopeful Donald Trump to display his prowess in diplomacy, an important skill when dealing with entire nations instead of a few employees.
Iran toys with U.S. days before we pay them, ridiculously, billions of dollars. Don't release money. We want our hostages back NOW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2016
Even our own American legal system doesn’t work as quickly as Iran did. I’ve heard of TSA interrogations that lasted longer. Of course, it’s hard to believe that Iran would have been so accommodating if The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a deal that will trade off economic sanctions for a slowdown of Iran’s nuclear program, wasn’t days away from being enacted, but that’s what diplomacy is all about: negotiating with other countries so that when you find yourself in a strange nation, you aren’t shot in the head because you could only be a spy.