Recently, the world's attention has been on North Korea due to its incessant threats to world peace, stability, and freedom.
Largely, the reaction of the international community in the form of new UN and US-led economic sanctions, rearmament, various demonstrations of military force, threats, speeches, and angry tweets were aimed at North Korea's repeated ICBM tests, braggadocio regarding its latest nuclear developments, and escalating apocalyptic rhetoric.
Although the House recently passed a new incarnation of the North Korean Human Rights Act, aimed at providing information from the outside world to the North Koreans, its substance is mostly aimed at empowering the average citizens, rather than at punishing the regime for turning the entire country into a concentration camp, for the mass arrests of its people, and the horrendous tortures of its citizens and the unlucky foreigners captured upon visit. Recently, the United States banned travel of US citizens to North Korea, largely to avoid the likely scenarios of having to negotiate with the totalitarian regime for the release - and tragically failing, as happened most recently in the case of Otto Warmbier, a student who was arrested, sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, but who, after brutal torture, had to be evacuate and died shortly upon his return to the United States.
But again, that is a preventative measure aimed at protecting US citizens, rather than a punitive measure against the regime.
After Warmbier's death, the only US reaction was ramped up rhetoric and a symbolic overflight of military planes in a show of force, which did little to deter the immediate escalation of aggression by North Korea on other fronts. No sanctions were levied against DPRK for that abduction on trumped up charges, and for the brutality resulting in murder. Despite the existing infrastructure of the Global Magnitsky Act, signed into by President Obama in 2016, no individuals or entities associated with this abhorrent series of events, was ever singled out for international shaming, and at the very least, symbolic PNGing from the United States and personal asset freeze. It took more than just the political elites to murder Warmbier, just as it takes more than just the members of the regime giving the orders to arrest, torture, and execute North Korean citizens on a daily basis. The police officers who arrested him, the judge who sentenced him, the wardens and the guards in the prisons where Warmbier spent the last year and a half of his life, the doctors who allegedly provided him with medical care and who lied about the conditions that led to his death, and frankly, even the negotiators who refused to release Mr. Warmbier in a timely manner into US custody, should all be held accountable for their part in this heinous act, and should be denied legitimacy in the eyes of the American people and international community. Publicly and irreversibly.
And sanctions against the regime itself should be levied specifically on the basis of this act of aggression against the United States, and violation of human rights under international law. I advocate for these seemingly unenforceable steps for the following reasons:
First, the Warmbier family deserves justice. Sanctions and punishments against all involved won't bring their son back, but they will know that the US values each individual's life, and will deal swiftly with anyone who deals with its citizens in such an unconscionable manner. Mr. Warmbier's suffering and death will not be for naught.
Second, DPRK and other countries around the world, engage in hostage-taking of foreigners, will get the message - US will not stand by idly, allowing these noxious regime to continue grabbing innocent people on trumped up charges, in violation of all international norms and basic civility. And particularly, further attacks on its own citizens will no longer be tolerated
Third, other US hostages around the world will get a sure morale boost from knowing that their country values them as human beings. It's not just about the US government not looking good as a result of failed negotiations, but rather, US passport has value, and if the US government cannot immediately get them out of their predicaments, it sure will make it hurt until it is no longer profitable to engage in these unjust imprisonments.
Fourth, by levying punishment on the basis of such abductions and other human rights violations, US is insisting on the value it puts on basic norms of civilized behave and reasserts its international leadership in maintaining a secure environment.
And fifth, the worst of human rights violators are also a danger and a threat to their neighbors and other adversaries on other fronts. If human rights violations against foreigners who travel are ignored, and attacks on the national sovereignty against their countries are dismissed, these aggressor are further emboldened to attack on other fronts and by other means. Unjust detention, torture, and murder of anyone US citizens should be considered an act of war on par with a missile thrown in our general direction, and treated with equal harshness.
We, should, at all times, carry ourselves from the position of strength, both military and moral. For we are indeed superior to North Korea's monstrous regime, and while we may choose to respect its sovereignty and not intervene to change the form of government, however awful, there are lines that can never be crossed, and that red line is attacks on and murder of US citizens.
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