An American was arrested in North Korea this weekend as he attempted to leave the country. He is now the third American to be held prisoner in the totalitarian country.
In 2014, THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Ethan Epstein argued that the United States should ban travel to North Korea:
That the North Korean regime has taken another American tourist hostage—this time it’s one Jeffrey Edward Fowle of Miamisburg, Ohio, who was seized in May after a Bible was reportedly discovered in his hotel room—is hardly surprising. North Korea is ferociously repressive, and, as Paul Marshall notes elsewhere in this issue, it targets Christians. What is odd is that the United States continues to allow Americans to travel to North Korea without any restrictions. North Korea routinely kidnaps foreigners and holds them for ransom; Fowle is in fact one of three Americans held there now, the other two being tourist Matthew Todd Miller, age 24, seized in April, apparently as he entered the country, and Kenneth Bae of Washington state, accused of subversive proselytizing and now serving a 15-year sentence. In the past five years alone, at least nine Americans have been imprisoned by the Stalinist state. Six, happily, have been released. But freeing them came at great cost to the United States. Americans rightly object to their fellow countrymen being held captive in foreign lands and support strong actions to bring them home. But doing so can have unseemly consequences.
Read the whole thing here.
