Read: Trump thinks he’s the only one who can fix North Korea

Since the Hanoi summit, diplomacy between the two countries has been on life support. The cause of collapse in Hanoi was simple: North Korea wanted a large package of sanctions relief, and the United States wouldn’t agree to it short of Pyongyang’s total nuclear abdication.

None of this was a surprise given what we knew going into the summit. With no room for agreement, the meeting ended before its scheduled conclusion, and both leaders went home empty-handed. Kim Jong Un has remained silent since his return, but satellite-imagery analysts have detected signs that North Korea had undertaken measures even before the Hanoi summit to reconstitute missile- and space-related facilities it had dismantled following last May’s Singapore summit.

What’s been clear since Hanoi is that the road back to the negotiating table won’t be easy. Moreover, each side is just one move away from probably causing the other to walk away from this round of talks altogether.

For North Korea, a satellite launch would do the trick. If Pyongyang were to move ahead with a launch, we’d have uncanny echoes of 2012, when the Barack Obama administration’s “Leap Day Deal” collapsed over disagreements between the two sides about whether a satellite-launch vehicle was really a missile. (North Korea insisted it was not.)

In Washington, new sanctions would also immediately derail talks. There’s no doubt that the U.S. Treasury Department has a range of additional sanctions measures ready on the docket for North Korea, if and when they become necessary. Since Hanoi, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton has publicly mooted the prospect of additional sanctions. In the past, both sides have hewed to a standard while talks between them went on: North Korea refrained from missile launches and other provocations, while the United States refrained from imposing new sanctions on Pyongyang.

Just as last week’s sanctions tweet demonstrated the ongoing conflict within the administration between the president and his deputies, so too did the approach taken in Hanoi. In the lead-up to that summit, Trump had tempered expectations for a deal, by emphasizing that all he cared about was the continuation of North Korea’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear and intercontinental-range missile testing, which had been announced last April.

Yet in Hanoi, the summit fell apart after maximalist demands were presented to the North Korean side. That wasn’t what Kim had anticipated in traveling to Hanoi. For Pyongyang, the expectation was that, like in Singapore, allowing the supreme leader to roll the dice on a one-on-one meeting with Trump, ever the unconventional U.S. president, would produce an outcome favorable to North Korea.

Read: Is Trump giving up on a nuclear-free North Korea?