Otto Warmbier and the Travesty of Negotiating with Tyranny

By Conrad Lagowski

In January 2016, Otto Warmbier, a twenty-two-year-old American student, was accused of stealing a propaganda poster while on a tour in North Korea, and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. The Obama administration responded by attempting to negotiate with the totalitarian regime for Warmbier’s release. That, predictably, did not work.

Instead, Warmb…