It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: –
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
The above stanzas come from British poet Rudyard Kipling’s 1911 poem, “Dane-geld, A.D. R980-1016” and was part of a compilation of poetry relating to English history. The poem describes the period in which foreign raiders, the Danes, ransacked Britain and threatened to destroy the fledgling kingdom of England if it would not pay them a ransom to depart. The Danegeld was a tax levied on English citizens to pay these recurring blackmail demands – and they were indeed recurring. The Danes would be paid off, temporarily leave the kingdom in peace, then invariably return relatively soon thereafter, strengthened by the previous payment, to ransack further villages and demand even more money – and so the cycle repeated.
Kipling’s poem, although facially about the Viking raids on Anglo-Saxon England, was actually arguing for the contemporary British Empire to avoid succumbing to the diplomatic blackmail leveled at it by Imperial Germany. German bluster, threats of naval action, and militaristic rhetoric were meant to force Britain to concede the legitimacy of German colonial aspirations. Britain’s failure to do so and its principled stance against German aggression were some of the key factors in the outbreak of the Great War just three years after ‘Dane-geld’ was published. Kipling’s stand against German intimidation was later embraced by the critics of Britain’s appeasement towards Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
It seems, however, that modern policymakers in the United States and Israel have failed to heed Kipling’s warning. Over the past few decades, both governments have adopted a policy of paying ransoms to their inveterate foes, only emboldening those enemies to engage in further malign acts.
The Biden Administration has chosen to repeatedly pay off their geopolitical blackmailers, both in Europe and the Middle East. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow jailed various American citizens in an attempt to mitigate the US response. One such case involved the WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was sentenced to nearly a decade in a Russian prison for the possession of a cannabis product. This was a high-profile case that the Biden Administration chose to prioritize, so the Danegeld was paid: the infamous Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, serving 25 years in prison for conspiring to kill Americans, was released in a prisoner swap. Since then, Putin’s regime has jailed several other Americans, including the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, so as to engage in further extortion.
Iran has been a target for conciliation under both the Obama and Biden Administrations. While the Trump Administration took a maximum pressure approach to Iran, the Biden Administration changed course by trying to revive the fatally flawed JCPOA nuclear deal, among other conciliatory gestures. Despite the current administration’s overtures towards peace, hostage-taking continues to be a tried-and-true tactic of the Islamic Republic. Americans, Brits, and other allied nationals continue to be held hostage by the regime for years, with Iran seeking monetary gain or policy concessions for their release and the Biden team seeming happy to pay up. In August 2023, the current administration paid Iran a whopping $6 billion for the return of 5 American prisoners – money which has been used to fund Iranian terror proxies including the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. That increased funding, provided partially by the United States, has led directly to the recent assaults on American interests and allies in the region.
The primary target of those increased terrorist attacks has been Israel. It suffered the worst atrocity in its history on October 7th when the Iran-affiliated terror group Hamas killed over 1,000 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more. One major reason behind the strategy of hostage-taking is the historic Israeli policy of ransoming its captives. Partly driven by Biblical interpretation and partly by domestic pressure, this paying of the Danegeld has been expected of all Israeli governments for several decades. The most prominent such case was the ransoming of the IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas in June of 2006. Five years later, Shalit was exchanged for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including many serving life sentences. One of the released inmates was none other than Yahya Sinwar, the military commander of Hamas in Gaza and architect of October 7th. Now, there is talk of yet another swap, gaining the release of Israelis held by Hamas for the past 9 months in exchange for an even greater number of Palestinian terrorists and a total withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza. Stunningly, the Netanyahu government is considering this.
History shows that paying the Danegeld never really gets rid of the Dane. Caving to ransom demands or political blackmail does not gain long-term security or peace; it merely creates a set of perverse incentives that reward bad actors for their misdeeds. Whether it is prematurely ending the war in Gaza to regain hostages, paying off the Houthis to stop their attacks on American warships and neutral commerce, bribing Tehran, or releasing arms dealers to Moscow, these are temporary solutions that only make the long-term problem far worse. Bad actors cannot be deterred through rewards, and taking such an approach can only ever, at best, lead to temporary quiet in one theater in exchange for more chaos in others. Paying the Danegeld is a bad deal.
Kipling said it best in the closing lines of his poem, all the way back in 1911:
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: –
“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!”