US absolutely has exit bans on people who break/is being investigated for national security and export control laws, which is what Manus did. Except Americans don't call it hostage taking when they do it.

You're right. To my knowledge, we don't hold citizens hostage to force them to unwind the sale of a foreign company they smuggled out of America into another country to a different foreign company.

But you cannot seriously hold America up as blameless when we've wielded our economy as a cudgel against anyone we remotely disagree with (sanctions against Cuba, Iran, China, Russia, etc; tariffs against everybody), have military bases scattered around the world to invade anyone at a moment's notice, regularly park our navy off foreign shores to coerce desired outcomes, and dronestrike civilians as a final saber-rattling before full-fledged conflict.

The details change, but the fundamental playbook - using state violence to coerce outcomes favorable to said state - is far from new. Hell, take a look beyond the past thirty years of history and there's a glut of incidents where empires used this sort of leverage to achieve outcomes - including the United States! We've traded political prisoners to achieve negotiated outcomes repeatedly, we just use different words to make ourselves feel better about it. We've propped up entire puppet states to ensure American corporate interests were served instead!

Like, holy shit, why do I have to teach you naysayers what's already outlined in history books just because you can't be bothered to do the assigned reading?