Sending North Korea a message

Last Thursday Otto Warmbier was buried.  He was 22, a promising young man at the beginning of what would have been a long and productive life surrounded by a loving family and friends.  The North Korean government seized him while he was with a group of other student visitors, charged him with stealing propaganda, imprisoned him, and then caused his death by torture.

If the Trump administration allows his murder to go unanswered by a punishing response, other hostages are likely to suffer similar fates, in North Korea or wherever and whenever Americans are taken prisoner.  As President Trump must surely know, the North Koreans returned the young man because they realized that the torture they had inflicted on him was about to result in their hostage’s death.  That Pyongyang did not want the appearance of blood on their hands shows that they worry about America’s reactions to such unprovoked savagery.

The Trump administration should seek to make the North Koreans worry more.  President Trump tweeted that “what happened to Otto…should never be allowed to happen.”  He is right. 

Standard operating procedure in a hostage situation is to negotiate but to use force if the terrorists begin to kill their victims.  North Korea’s murder of Otto Warmbier shows that the Pyongyang government is willing to kill its hostages.  President Trump appears very much to mean what he says: this should not happen again.  To make certain, the Trump administration needs to act effectively, forcefully, and swiftly.  It should start by reversing the mistakes of its predecessors.