“I hope like hell that Trump resists the urge to start taunting or tweeting over the next few weeks,” Brett Bruen, a former Foreign Service officer, told me. For the last several months, diplomats and foreign-policy experts had been agonizing over President Donald Trump’s reckless provocation of North Korea and its equally trigger-happy leader, Kim Jong Un. In recent weeks, however, the rhetoric surrounding the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula has turned apocalyptic. U.S. intelligence agencies were reportedly shocked by how quickly Pyongyang has developed missiles capable of striking Los Angeles or Washington. Talks between the two nations have repeatedly broken down over Kim’s insistence on a nuclear deterrent. And Trump, who never put much stock in diplomatic niceties, has become increasingly unhinged. “I would hope that his advisers can impress upon him the delicacy, the importance, of letting this process play out without the grandstanding and the goading that he has shown thus far in his presidency,” Bruen sighed, emphasizing the need for nuance and restraint. Trump’s Freudian tweets about the size and potency of his “Nuclear Button” suggest little interest in either.

The head-spinning threats, and general sense that the adult-day-care centers in both countries have gone unsupervised, have stoked fears within the usually staid “deep state”—chills likely exacerbated by recent revelations in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury that the president might not be mentally prepared to perform the elaborate calculus required in nuclear brinkmanship. “All of the war-game solutions—they are all horrific,” one current State Department staffer told me, responding to a report that the administration is weighing a limited, pre-emptive military strike if North Korea tests another missile. Other diplomats I spoke with also emphasized that the odds of a deadly miscalculation were unacceptably high. “I think most folks at State, especially the Korea hands, feel it would be a big mistake—it wouldn’t work, and it would unnecessarily imperil and undermine our alliance with Seoul and put Japan at great risk. It would also likely force the Chinese to revert to greater defense of their neighbor,” a second State Department staffer told me. “Given the administration’s lack of respect for diplomacy, however, I am not sure that State’s opinions matter very much.”

The administration’s defenders have pointed to the stewardship of Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, as evidence that the North Korean issue is under control. And, at times, Trump’s threats have precipitated dialogue. The resumption of formal talks this week between North Korea and South Korea, over North Korea’s participation in next month’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, seemed to suggest that the president’s bluster—combined with crippling economic sanctions—had been effective. After 11 hours of talks on Tuesday, officials reached a promising agreement: North Korea will send a large delegation of athletes, journalists, and cheerleaders to the Winter Olympics, and Pyongyang and Seoul will hold bilateral military talks. “The just-concluded talks aren’t huge but, in truth, anything that produces dialogue is good,” a former Foreign Service officer told me. According to the diplomat, who served as an ambassador to an East Asian country, the end goal should be a return to “something like six-party talks”—something North Korea signaled Tuesday is not yet on the table.

Denuclearization, however, reportedly remains a nonstarter. And McMaster is keeping the prospect of a “military option” firmly on the table. While Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson continue to push for a diplomatic solution, diplomats I spoke with say the Trumpian threats hurt more than they help. “If you’ve got some level of negotiations taking place, the saber-rattling can only serve to disrupt and potentially derail that process,” Bruen said. “So it would be important for the White House and the Pentagon to be quite circumspect in how they are talking about any potential strike options or the possibility of military force.”