Sixty-four years after North Korea and the US signed an armistice to suspend the Korean War, the State Department has banned American citizens from traveling to the hermit state.
The travel ban is a relatively easy picking among a platter of bad choices for Donald Trump. The US president has not yet elaborated on his warning to North Korea that “all options are on the table” after Pyongyang fired a missile over Japan last week, but something like the travel curb could be a small sign of what is to come.
Over the past decade North Korea has detained about 15 US citizens, all of whom have become bargaining chips and leverage for Pyongyang in its dealings with Washington. It is a pattern that forces US officials to expend resources, time and political capital to try to secure their release.
In July, Pyongyang returned Michigan college student Otto Warmbier in a coma. His death a few days later gave impetus to the State Department’s push for a travel ban.
But what will it accomplish? Washington has three main goals: To prevent American visitors being used as bargaining chips by Pyongyang, to deny the regime tourist dollars and to send a message about the unacceptability of its behavior.
The first goal will be partially achieved. The ban immediately eliminates the risk of American tourists being detained. However, only four of those held since 2009 were tourists. Several crossed the China-North Korea border illegally for religious or journalistic reasons. Others were conducting humanitarian, development, health or education work.
The State Department has made clear that US citizens visiting for “limited humanitarian or other purposes may apply to the Department of State for a special validation passport.” Perversely, such people may now be more vulnerable: If Pyongyang is looking for political pawns, there will be a smaller pool to choose from.
Nevertheless, the need for a special passport may allow the US government to vet who can travel to North Korea for work. Many humanitarians or teachers focused on North Korea appear to have deep religious convictions that make them vulnerable to breaking some of the country’s rules, written or unwritten. The ability to deny a passport may allow the State Department to protect some of these people from themselves.
In the end, a travel ban will probably reduce the number of detainees the US has to deal with, but it is unlikely to eliminate them altogether.
The Korean War never officially ended, and is now being fought with threatening words and travel bans.
Andray Abrahamian
The second and third goals are more closely related. About 1,000 US tourists a year do indeed contribute to the growing North Korean economy, but the average Western tourist spends about $2,000 per trip, so their impact is small. Even if all tourism stopped tomorrow, even from China, and Pyongyang lost out on the $30 million this industry provides, its nuclear and missile programs would be unaffected.
Nor do profits from tourism go into some central regime coffer. The major misunderstanding about North Korea today is the assumption that it is a command economy, with everything done by and for the state. In fact, it is largely a market economy with multitudes of companies connected to different institutions, paying individual wages, buying input materials from suppliers, and when possible even hiding earnings from the authorities. Tourist dollars get spread around to some extent.
That is not to say that tourists can entirely avoid supporting Kim Jong Un’s goals. When visitors fly into the country on Air Koryo – as most do – they are paying money to a military-owned company. And that military is, of course, now dedicated to developing weapons that can hit the US mainland. After the State Department announced in late July it would seek a travel ban, several North Korean missile tests and multiple rounds of rhetoric were launched across the Pacific Ocean. Pyongyang, fond of symbolism, referred to “the powerful nuclear hammer” it could inflict “at the heart of the US” if it thought Washington was trying to oust Kim.
This travel ban is also a form of symbolism. It is a statement that North Korea’s behavior is so far outside acceptable norms that the US government is willing to forbid its own citizens from traveling there. It also signals US intent to clamp down on North Korea’s economy, even in small ways.
There will be costs, too. Person-to-person exchanges can influence how people think, even in a controlled state such as North Korea. Exposure to foreign people and ideas has changed how Pyongyang’s middle and upper-middle classes see the world. Observers of North Korea also learn a surprising amount from the tourism industry, as tourists frequently spot changes and trends. Some of this will be lost if the tourist industry contracts.
The ban is an exceptionally rare action for the US. It will go down as one more marker in the long history of conflict between the two countries. It is sobering to think that the men who signed the armistice in 1953 are long gone, while this tortured relationship endures.
• Andray Abrahamian is a visiting fellow at the Jeju Peace Research Institute and at the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
