BEIJING, May 18. /TASS/. Withdrawing from the planned summit with the United States will bring North Korea no benefits, China’s Global Times daily wrote on Friday, citing Zhu Feng, an international relations professor at Nanjing University.
According to him, the meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump "was by no means a sure thing" as "risks included a new round of confrontation brought on by a shutdown in diplomatic communications or a new nuclear test by North Korea."
However, in the expert’s view, "withdrawing from the summit would bring North Korea no benefits, and the summit is also the last chance for the US to resolve the issue diplomatically," the Global Times said.
Research fellow at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences Lu Chao, in turn, told the Global Times that "there is no sign or reason to cancel the summit although the US and North Korea have huge differences on denuclearization." "An inflexible US approach was the largest risk to the summit, Lu said, adding that Washington had not only failed to respond to Pyongyang's goodwill promises, but had also kept up pressure," the daily wrote.
On May 15, North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that Pyongyang had cancelled the May 16 high-level talks with Seoul over the joint US-South Korean military drills dubbed Max Thunder. At the same time, North Korea threatened to reconsider the summit with the United States, scheduled to take place in Singapore on June 12.