US should honor Singapore consensus: China Daily editorial

China's State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking to Chinese media on Monday, said that the renewed tensions between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea are mainly due to Washington failing to address the legitimate and reasonable concerns of Pyongyang and not effectively implementing the consensus reached in Singapore.

China welcomed and supported the summit between DPRK top leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump in June last year, with Wang hailing the meeting as an opportunity for the two countries, which had been antagonistic toward each other for more than half a century, to make history by sitting down together and agreeing to substantive steps to realize the establishment of a peace mechanism for the Korean Peninsula.

With Washington having agreed to make joint efforts with Pyongyang to build a lasting and stable peace regime, it is natural that Wang should express China's disappointment at its failure to honor that agreement since it has resulted in the previously promising dialogue with Pyongyang becoming a war of words in which their words are once again of war.

The two leaders have met each other three times since their first groundbreaking meeting in Singapore. Their second summit in Hanoi collapsed at the start of this year, and although Trump took a historic step into the DPRK, which seemed to suggest the US had something up its sleeve, the interpersonal rapport between them, if not staged, has not translated into mutual trust between the two countries.

The two sides' most recent contact, a painful, yet fruitless, 8.5-hour closed door meeting in Stockholm in early October, prompted different views of its worth — Pyongyang said it broke up, and Washington said it was a good dialogue — showing just how far apart the two sides still are because the US has not made any substantial moves in response to the DPRK's denuclearization steps.

If the US continues to talk of its hopes of a political solution while persisting with sanctions and maintaining its security threat targeting the DPRK, it is doing nothing but backpedaling on the Singapore consensus.

The window of opportunity for productive dialogue is closing as whatever rapport there was between Washington and Pyongyang is rapidly disappearing. So the US should take practical measures to implement the Singapore consensus as soon as possible.

The proposal China and Russia have put forward to the United Nations Security Council for the lifting of some sanctions on the DPRK not only reflects the urgency of Pyongyang's needs, but also that the tensions are already on a hair trigger.