Speaking at the recent international conference in New Zealand, the ambassador-at-large of Singapore said that the U.S. could not stop the DPRK's development of nuclear-armed ICBMs capable of reaching its mainland.

Unilateral military action by Washington would impose serious direct risks on its allies, south Korea and Japan, and this would cause grievous political damage and could permanently undermine trust in America well beyond Northeast Asia, the ambassador said, urging the U.S. administration to come out to the negotiating table for conclusion of DPRK-U.S. peace accord.

The former Singaporean permanent representative to the United Nations dedicated an article titled "How the Western media gets the Korean crisis wrong" to the newspaper The Straits Times, which said:

Since the Western (especially Anglo-Saxon) narrative is so dominant and so seductive, we get easily taken in by it.

Paradoxically while the North Korean regime is behaving erratically, it is not behaving irrationally. It can bluster about war because it knows that everyone knows that war is not an option for the Korean peninsula.

It is naive to believe that a military build-up can squeeze Pyongyang. The decision to deploy the U.S. aircraft carrier group led by Carl Vinson is an empty gesture. It will not make the North Korean regime scared.

In the article the representative stated that the policy of pressure on the DPRK is ineffective and that if the United States hopes to achieve peace on the Korean peninsula, it should start finding ways to make Pyongyang feel more secure.

And the representative advised Singaporeans to be supremely skeptical of the seductive Western narrative.