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 of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose nuclear program presents the most dangerous foreign policy challenge the United States faces.

In the poll, taken Saturday through Tuesday, half of Americans, 49%, say the Trump administration should take some sort of action to punish North Korea; about a third, 35%, disagreed. Warmbier, on a five- day tour, 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 con- front its nuclear program.

“I believe that the government needs to use all the tools at our disposal in a comprehensive, coordinated 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. The national survey of 1,000 registered voters has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.