Jamie Metzl is a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council. He has served on the US National Security Council, at the State Department and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is the author of "Genesis Code" and "Eternal Sonata" and the forthcoming book "Homo Sapiens 2.0: Genetic Enhancement and the Future of Humanity." Follow him on Twitter @jamiemetzl. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) If their goal is to eliminate North Korea's nuclear weapons threat, the planned talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un are doomed before they even begin.

There is nothing inherently wrong with negotiating with North Korea, but the Trump administration seems to have found the negotiation path that maximizes the potential benefits to the North Koreans while minimizing the benefits to the US and its allies.

The United States was already at a disadvantage in its dealings with North Korea because the Trump administration has no coherent strategy for dealing with North Korea, while North Korea's leaders have an extremely smart strategy for America. Beginning from the first day of the planned Kim-Trump talks, the US will have already given North Korea the legitimation Pyongyang has sought for decades, a reduction in tensions and a nod toward ending the state of war on the Korean peninsula -- in exchange for very little.

From North Korea's perspective, the legitimacy that comes from a leadership meeting with a US president and ongoing negotiations as an equal are big wins. Now that it has established a credible nuclear deterrent, North Korea has every incentive to reduce tensions in the region as long as the Kim regime retains its absolute control inside the country and uses the leverage nuclear weapons provide internationally. That's why the series of confidence-building measures North Korea has already announced and likely will negotiate -- including a hotline phone connecting North and South Korea's top leaders, a nuclear testing and long-range missile launch freeze, and perhaps even some preliminary inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency -- make sound strategic sense for North Korea.

But because North Korea's leaders see nuclear weapons as the primary survival strategy of their regime, they will not ultimately give up those weapons unless the costs of keeping them are greater than the costs of giving them up. The only way they will reach this conclusion is if they believe either that the US is going to use military force to overthrow their government or that China is going to completely cut the country off from trade and aid if they don't give up their nukes. Neither of these scenarios is possible.

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