Opinion

Americans in distress

When Hollywood director Oliver Stone goes to Venezuela, the ruling regime rolls out the red carpet. Fellow filmmaker Timothy Tracy isn’t so lucky. He was thrown in a Caracas jail last week.

Tracy was charged Saturday with conspiracy, apparently at the personal behest of Venezuela’s new president, Nicolas Maduro. Though he was filming a documentary, Maduro accuses him, ridiculously, of trying to foment violence following disputed elections this month.

Meanwhile, 9,000 miles away, another American was in even worse peril. On Saturday, North Korea announced charges against Kenneth Bae. Bae is a US citizen who was arrested last December on the grounds that he was plotting to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s fledgling regime.

Bae’s real crime, experts say, is that his camera was found to have photographs of emaciated North Korean orphans whom he had tried to help feed. Can’t have the world knowing that children are starving because of Pyongyang’s policies. So Bae now faces the death penalty if convicted.

Tracy and Bae join Alan Gross, an American contractor who’s been in Cuban prison for three years on trumped-up charges. Likewise, there are questions about the disappearance of David Sneddon, an American who vanished in China in 2004. A Japanese cabinet official creditably suggests Sneddon was kidnapped by Pyongyang.

It’s no coincidence that all these US citizens find themselves in similar danger. Plainly, the shaky regimes in Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba believe that grabbing an American, far from angering the US, may help them prop themselves up by giving them human negotiating chips.

Washington only makes it easier for them whenever the government concludes that our relations with these regimes are at such a delicate point that we can’t afford to upset their leaders. Maybe it’s time to reverse that logic, and start making these horrible regimes more worried about angering us.