Poll: 49% want to punish North Korea for student’s death

Americans are inclined to say the Trump administration should take action to punish North Korea for the death of Otto Warmbier, the college student from Ohio who died last week, a few days after being released in a coma from a Pyongyang prison.

A new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds support for tougher economic sanctions but little appetite for a military threat against the erratic regime whose nuclear program presents the most dangerous foreign policy challenge the United States faces.

Thad Milsap, who was among those surveyed, worries about what reaction any U.S. penalties might prompt from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“If we do anything to him, what he can do back is so drastic,” the 45-year-old teacher from Boynton Beach, Fla., said. “We’ve already got every sanction we can put on him on him, but I think anything done militarily would be a mistake.”

In the poll, taken Saturday through Tuesday, half of Americans, 49%, says the Trump administration should take some sort of action to punish North Korea; about a third, 35%, disagreed. Warmbier, on a five-day tour there, was arrested in January 2015 and accused of trying to tear down a political banner from his hotel. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor and disappeared from view until he was released in a coma and near death.

Former undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman says the White House should take steps to penalize the rogue nation for Warmbier’s death and devise a more comprehensive strategy to confront its nuclear program.

“I believe that the government needs to use all the tools at our disposal in a comprehensive, co- ordinated fashion that probably takes us to the brink before it has any success,” she told Capital Download. To the brink of a military confrontation? “Yes, probably,” she replied. In the survey, among those who supported taking action, about two-thirds called for tighter economic sanctions and four in 10 said the United States should prohibit travel to North Korea. Just 17% said military action should be considered.

The survey of 1,000 registered voters has a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.

Sherman said “very quiet discussions” with U.S. officials had led to Warmbier’s final release.

“I think they understood that Warmbier was going to die, and I think they began to understand ... that if he died in North Korea it would be utterly devastating for them,” she said.