When a deal stalls, most people's instinct is to make it smaller. Cut the scope. Drop a term. Find the one clean trade everyone can live with.
Sometimes that's exactly wrong.
I recently read Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War, by Wall Street Journal reporters Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. It goes behind the scenes of every Putin prisoner negotiation I've covered on this podcast — Brittney Griner, the WNBA star jailed over trace amounts of hemp oil in her luggage; Evan Gershkovich, a Journal reporter snatched and charged with espionage; Paul Whelan, a former Marine accused of spying on no real evidence.
The pattern is the same one Putin runs again and again: grab an American on a flimsy charge, hand down a brutal sentence, and use the prisoner as currency to win back Russian spies and assassins caught in the West. The book reads like a spy novel — I couldn't put it down.
But the figure who stuck with me wasn't a spy. It was a negotiator named Roger Carstens.
Carstens was the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs from 2020 to 2025 — the person sent into the bleakest rooms to bargain Americans out of foreign prisons. He's a West Point graduate and a retired Army Special Forces officer. He has a saying: I only hire optimists. Not Pollyannas — people who refuse to stop seeing possibilities when the situation looks hopeless.
Here's the situation he was staring at. The U.S. wanted Gershkovich, the kidnapped Journal reporter, and Whelan, a Marine jailed on a spy charge with no evidence. Russia wanted Vadim Krasikov — an assassin who'd gunned down one of Putin's exiled enemies in a Berlin park, in daylight, in front of schoolchildren, before trying to flee on a bicycle. He was caught and locked in a German prison, and getting him back was the thing Putin wanted most. But Germany had already said no. Trade a convicted murderer, sent to kill a refugee on German soil, for one American? The German foreign minister was, in the authors' words, aghast. The deal was dead.
Then Carstens had dinner in Georgetown with Christo Grozev — a Bulgarian investigative journalist who unmasks Russian spies for a living, and who sits near the top of the Kremlin's kill list. Over red wine, Grozev pulled out a napkin and wrote two columns of names. Russian illegals on one side, Americans on the other. But he added one more name — the one Putin hated so much he wouldn't say it out loud: Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption activist who had become Putin's most prominent political rival, survived a nerve-agent poisoning, and was then rotting in a Russian penal colony.
That should have made the deal harder. More names, more governments, more ways to fall apart. Carstens saw it the other way. He sent Washington a one-page memo with a phrase for it: enlarging the problem. Sometimes to solve a problem, you have to make it bigger.
The logic is counterintuitive until you sit with it. A one-for-one trade gives each side a single, fixed reason to say no. Enlarge it — add prisoners, add stakes, add a name that changes the political weather — and you give everyone a new reason to say yes. Suddenly Germany isn't freeing an assassin for one reporter; it's part of a historic, multi-country deal that frees a man it admires. The trade nobody could swallow alone becomes digestible inside something larger.
You don't need a hostage file to use this. You're stuck selling A for B — the price won't move, the terms won't bend, and the whole thing is about to collapse. Don't keep hammering the same single trade. Ask what else you can put on the table.
Say you're two parties dug in on price, tens of thousands apart, neither side willing to blink. Stop fighting over the number and widen the frame. Bring in the payment schedule, the timing, the length of the relationship, the things nobody had thought to count.
Once there's more on the table, the number that felt immovable stops being the only thing in the room — and a figure that couldn't move alone suddenly has somewhere to go.
When a deal won't close on its own terms, change the terms by widening them. That's enlarging the problem.
Now, enlarging a problem doesn't mean you get every piece of it. Navalny died in that Russian prison before any version of the deal could be done, and that part of the dream died with him. But here's what's easy to miss: the bigger conversation was what kept the whole thing alive. By widening the deal, Carstens gave it enough mass and enough urgency to keep moving when the narrow version had stalled. The grand bargain eventually closed — the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War — and Gershkovich came home. The enlarged frame is what carried the deal there, even though not every name on the napkin made it out.
So the next time you hear yourself trying to shrink a negotiation down to the one thing you can both agree on — stop. Ask the harder question. What would happen if you made it bigger?
Remember: negotiation is life.
– Gene
