USA TODAY International Edition
Otto Warmbier gave a face to U.S.-North Korean standoff
Student’s death ‘personalizes’ a global showdown
The death of Otto Warmbier this year not only devastated a family and grabbed national attention but also generated geopolitical waves that made worse the already rocky relationship between the United States and North Korea.
Warmbier’s arrest, detention and tragic homecoming gave the confrontation between the United States and North Korea a human form.
Here was a handsome, kindhearted college student so curious about the world that he spent a New Year’s Eve in an authoritarian country — then apparently made a mistake that had consequences personal and global.
The arrival of a new U.S. president delivered plenty of change this year to the U.S.-North Korean dynamic. The Warmbier saga brought the standoff to
the kitchen table and “personalizes it,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who has been a liaison for Warmbier’s parents. “It’s changed the emotional response to this difficult relationship we have with a rogue regime.”
The Warmbier story meshed with the harder line President Trump has taken with North Korea, such as promising “fire and fury like the world has never seen” to deter North Korea’s missile testing. Trump even threw out a nickname for the nation’s third-generation autocrat, Kim Jong Un: “Rocket Man.” In turn, the North Korean government called Trump an “old dotard.”
In June, Trump mentioned Otto Warmbier in promising “to handle” North Korea.
In the last two months of 2017, Congress advanced legislation that would require U.S. penalties on foreign banks that do business with North Korea. Then, the U.S. State Department returned North Korea, after a decade’s hiatus, to its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Warmbier was a student at the University of Virginia when he paid a Chinese company, Young Pioneer Tours, to visit North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, for five days including New Year’s. On Jan. 2, 2016, Warmbier was about to board his flight home when police arrested him and charged him with stealing a poster at a hotel.
He was convicted in a one-hour trial and was sentenced that March to 15 years of hard labor. He was 21.
There was silence for 15 months. In Pyongyang, a Swedish diplomat serving as the U.S. representative was barred from visiting Warmbier. As is customary in such delicate cases, the Obama administration advised Warmbier’s parents, Fred and Cindy, to be silent. The couple finally raised their voices in a Fox News interview in April to criticize Obama for not securing their son’s release, and they begged President Trump to bring him home.
By June, a State Department envoy went to Pyongyang to get Warmbier. Then came devastating news: While in custody, Warmbier had suffered a brain injury that left him blind, deaf, bedridden and unable to speak. The medical term is “unresponsive wakefulness.”
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry offered a puzzling explanation: Warmbier had gotten botulism poisoning and taken a sleeping pill, apparently in that order.
On his return, when the 6,700-mile flight landed in Cincinnati the night of June 13, Warmbier had to be carried by his feet and shoulders.
Doctors at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center could not specify a cause of injury except that the brain was starved for a period of minutes of blood or oxygen or both.
On the first day of summer, Fred and Cindy Warmbier buried their child, who had died at the age of 22. By autumn, they had honed their sorrow into a weapon on television and Capitol Hill to push for foreign policy action.
Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, of Westwood, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he distrusts anything North Korea says about Warmbier. “To be held by Kim Jong Un’s thugs for a year or longer, to me, is torture in and of itself,” Chabot said.
Three other Americans are in North Korean custody.
After 70 years of one-family rule, 25 million North Koreans know the consequences when the government frowns on certain behavior. Arresting Warmbier was not an act intended for domestic persuasion. If things had proceeded as in the past, North Korea probably would have released Warmbier for a public relations score — but something injured his brain, and the agonizing silence of 15 months may have been the sign of a dictatorship trying to decide what to do next.