Individual risk-taking can so quickly become America’s collective problem.
When sharks gather offshore, lifeguards rightly close down beaches to save lives. It’s long past time to take the same approach toward American tourists seeking travel into North Korea.
The tragic death Monday of Otto Warmbier, 22, following his brutal and senseless imprisonment by Kim Jong Un’s outlaw regime, only underscores how the U. S. government is helpless to protect citizens who go there.
Why would anyone risk traveling to North Korea? As it turns out, international tour companies entice thrill-seeking or oblivious Americans to venture behind “the world’s last remaining iron curtain” or enjoy “budget tours to destinations your mother wants you to stay away from!” The tour operators have often argued that the travel is safe and, as a consequence, an estimated 800 to 1,000 Americans yield to the inducement each year.
All of this is despite increasingly dire State Department warnings that read like entering a chamber of horrors. Americans visiting North Korea lose all right to privacy and risk being searched, arrested and imprisoned for doing next to nothing, the State Department advises.
Warmbier’s purported “crime” was taking a propaganda poster from a hotel, for which he was sentenced early last year to 15 years of hard labor only to be brought home in a coma last week to die. North Korea’s explanation for the coma — botulism and sleeping pills — proved spurious, according to U. S. doctors.
OPPOSING VIEW:
At least 16 Americans have been detained by North Korea in the past 10 years.
