Who is responsible for the abrupt collapse of peace negotiations between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Hanoi last month? Though the summit’s failure does not mean the end of the peace process on the Korean peninsula – both sides were restrained and polite in their commentary afterward, with no insulting tweets or impromptu missile tests – it is a serious setback. Initial reports suggest there is lots of blame to go around, from Trump’s overestimation of his own abilities as a dealmaker, to Kim’s possibly unrealistic expectations as to how little the US would be willing to accept, to the uncompromising hawkishness of the national security adviser, John Bolton, who may have intentionally sabotaged negotiations by throwing extra demands into the mix at the last minute.

Some of this blame, however, belongs to Democratic politicians and liberal commentators, who have reliably denigrated Trump’s Korean outreach from the beginning, and did everything they could to diminish the Hanoi summit’s chances for success. Trump is an ignorant narcissist motivated solely by the desire to watch people say nice things about him on television, but his vanity has allowed Kim and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, to jump-start a process that now offers the best chance for peace on the Korean peninsula in many decades. It is a genuinely historic opportunity, and for liberals to undermine it because they can’t stomach the idea of Trump receiving a Nobel peace prize is shameful.

It is a genuinely historic opportunity, and for liberals to undermine it because they can’t stomach the idea of Trump receiving a Nobel peace prize is shameful

The problem starts at the top, with the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Two weeks ahead of the summit, Pelosi chastised a group of South Korean lawmakers who were visiting Washington to seek US support for the peace process. She described the first Trump-Kim summit as diplomatically meaningless and warned that Kim’s true intention was not the denuclearization of the peninsula but simply the “demilitarization” of South Korea. She also said that her understanding of the Kim regime’s true intentions, which the South Korean officials are apparently incapable of discerning on their own despite their regular interactions with that regime, was based on a visit she made to the North some 22 years ago. Pelosi’s condescension was reportedly prompted in part by a leader of South Korea’s rightwing opposition party. Then, shortly after the failure of the Hanoi summit, Pelosi held a press conference in which she did not even bother trying to hide her pleasure regarding the negotiations’ collapse. “I guess it took two meetings for [Trump] to realize that Kim Jong-un is not on the level,” she said.

The Democratic senator Bob Menendez, a top official on the Senate foreign relations committee, has also expressed concern that North and South Korea might be making too much diplomatic progress for America’s liking. He joined the Republican ultraconservative Ted Cruz in complaining to the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, that President Moon’s engagement with North Korea had gone beyond their comfort level. Menendez urged Pompeo to keep both North and South Korea in line, a strange request considering that one of those countries is a crucial regional ally, while the other is still technically a wartime enemy.

Liberal commentators have followed suit, from newspaper columnists all the way down to Twitter users with “#Resist” in their profile bios. In the run-up to the Hanoi summit, liberal opinion writers wrung their hands about the possibility that Trump would “give away too much”, by which they appeared to mean that he would accept anything other than “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization”, a ludicrous starting point for a serious negotiation, as nuclear weapons remain North Korea’s only real leverage. As the summit was taking place, Democrats staged spectacular hearings with Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer now turned informant, obviously designed to undercut Trump’s negotiating position. “I find it ironic,” Cohen said at one point, addressing Trump directly, “that you are in Vietnam right now” (he’d been discussing Trump’s draft-dodging). And in the wake of the summit’s failure, the New Yorker reveled in Trump’s “humiliating twenty-four hours”, while Twitter users got “#TrumpFail” to trend.

The most Democrats have offered the peace process so far is hysterical rhetoric about North Korean leadership that has been stale for upwards of 25 years

As for what the ultimate failure of this peace process would mean for those most affected by it – the millions of Koreans who have lived under the threat of violence for more than 50 years, people who would like to see their civilization made whole again one day – these alleged progressives have had much less to say. The Korean war has long been an enormous blank spot in the average American’s historical awareness (unlike the ceaselessly mourned and debated and sentimentalized Vietnam war), and today that lack of awareness persists in politicians’ remarks and journalists’ commentary on the peace process, which have overwhelmingly focused on the eccentricities, bombast and hairstyling choices of the two national leaders. To hear these people tell it, the worst possible outcome of the peace process would be that Trump receives some friendly news coverage or even gets an award that he didn’t quite deserve on the merits.

This is childish and myopic, and it speaks to the intellectual void at the party’s center that the most Democrats have offered the peace process so far is hysterical rhetoric about North Korean leadership that has been stale for upwards of 25 years. Demonizing Trump was a poor substitute for having any useful policy proposals in the 2016 presidential election, and it’s a poor substitute for substantive foreign policy thinking today. Just before the Hanoi summit, a group of 20 progressive House Democrats that includes Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee introduced a resolution supporting the peace process and calling for an end to the Korean war. This was an encouraging sign, but its sponsors remain on the outer margins of the party’s leadership and power structure. If Democrats want to improve America’s international relationships anytime soon, those progressives will need to push their way to the party’s center as soon as possible.