As Donald Trump’s highly anticipated 12-day trip to Asia draws to a close, the state of the growing North Korean nuclear threat appears more convoluted than ever. While the president’s stance on North Korea has never been easy to interpret, at times appearing to undercut that of his own State Department, a series of Twitter missives and contradictory remarks abroad has reportedly left Pyongyang, along with the broader global community, scrambling to make sense of how exactly the president will respond to the nation’s saber-rattling—a situation that, according to two experts who have been covertly meeting with North Korean officials for months, does the U.S. no favors.

Trump kicked off his trip appearing to endorse a multilateral approach to Kim Jong Un’s pursuit of nuclear capability, and although he warned North Korea in Japan that “America’s warriors are prepared to defend our nation using the full range of our unmatched capabilities,” he later delivered a surprisingly measured speech to South Korea’s National Assembly, appearing to address Jong-un when he said, “We will offer a path to a much better future. It begins with an end to the aggression of your regime, a stop to your development of ballistic missiles, and complete, verifiable, and total denuclearization.” But his restraint cracked on Sunday when, seemingly prompted by the North Korean state media’s characterization of him as a “lunatic old man” and its call to Americans to oust him from office to get rid of an “abyss of doom,” Trump launched a personal attack against the North Korean leader. “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’ Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend,” Trump wrote.

Just hours later, however, Trump seemed to be over the dig; when asked by reporters at the Presidential Palace in Vietnam whether he could see himself becoming friends with Kim, he replied, “strange things happen in life. That might be a strange thing to happen, but it’s certainly a possibility,” and adding, “If that did happen, it would be a good thing for—I can tell you—for North Korea. But it would also be good for lots of other places, and it would be good for the world.”

The president’s hot-and-cold approach, said Suzanne DiMaggio, a scholar at New America who has spent nearly two decades in secret discussions with the North Koreans, is giving Pyongyang whiplash. “They follow the news very closely; they watch CNN 24/7; they read his tweets and other things,” she told Politico. After expressing tentative optimism at Trump’s takeover from Barack Obama, DiMaggio said North Korean leadership is struggling to make sense of the president’s contradictory rhetoric—a task that was further complicated by Trump’s call to decertify the Iran nuclear accord. “They really want to know what is his end game,” and “If he’s crazy or if this is just an act,” she said.