We should probably expect the Plaza Hotel treatment for the coming Kim-Trump summit. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has demanded “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” or CVID in the argot of the negotiators. That will not be forthcoming. But perhaps something else will: a testing pause, maybe, or some other interim measure that can somehow be upgraded into the promised “great deal.”

The administration may have little choice by now but to carry on the pretense that it is scoring a great success in its Korea negotiations, and for two reasons.

First, U.S. options in the Korean peninsula depend heavily on the cooperation of South Korea. Trump has now thoroughly frightened and alienated South Korean opinion. South Korea’s dovish president, Moon Jae In, was elected with only 41 percent of the vote. Polls now show his approval rating in the mid-70s, because of his success in drawing Trump away from “fire and fury” and toward negotiations. As Robert Kelly of Pusan National University in South Korea observes, revulsion against Trump has consolidated a dovish consensus in South Korea.

Much of the work of snookering Trump into the Kim summit has actually been done by South Koreans, not North Koreans. It was President Moon who slyly insinuated that Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for the summit—bait that Trump swallowed like a credulous guppy. In fact, it was a South Korean delegation that first put the summit idea into Trump’s head back in March. It was the South Koreans who immediately announced Trump’s impulsive “yes” answer at the very entrance to the West Wing, thus effectively locking the door behind the president before he understood the full implications of what he had done—and before he could be dissuaded by his staff and secretary of state.

The South Korean leadership is not only seeking to constrain Trump’s options—it is advertising that constraint to the world. In August 2017, Moon asserted a veto over any U.S. military operations on the peninsula. Maybe Moon can enforce that veto. Maybe not. But U.S. strategic planners have been put on notice that America’s most important ally in this theater wants no part of a Trump-led war. Under the circumstances, pretending to believe in the success of a Trump-Kim summit may become the least-bad option inside the Pentagon as well as in Seoul.

But the Trump administration may have little choice except to oversell the summit for another reason, this time of its own making: Before actually booking a Korean success, it committed itself to a second confrontation, against Iran.

Two nuclear crises in one summer is strong coffee, even for a John Bolton National Security Council. If the administration is to prosecute a vigorous policy versus Iran, it needs to de-escalate in northeast Asia. A pretend-success at the summit is—at this point—probably the only way to achieve that de-escalation.