In short, we may be headed for a game of chicken, with Trump and Kim at the wheel. And the rest of us are all in the back seat.

If the summit is not rescheduled, we’ll be worse off than before because it will be difficult for Trump to return to his policy of strangling North Korea economically. China has already been quietly relaxing sanctions, and South Korea may not have the stomach for maintaining strong sanctions, either. That might make the military toolbox more appealing to Trump.

Some Republicans have praised Trump for his North Korea diplomacy, and there’s been talk about him winning a Nobel Peace Prize. That’s preposterous. Just look at how we got here.

Trump’s jingoistic rhetoric didn’t particularly intimidate North Korea, but it terrified South Korea, which feared it would be collateral damage in a new Korean war. So South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, shrewdly used the Olympics to undertake a peace mission to bring the U.S. and North Korea together, flattering Trump to make this happen. This was commendable on Moon’s part; he’s the one who genuinely deserves the Nobel Peace Prize if this works out.

Then Trump rashly accepted the idea of a face-to-face meeting on June 12, without adequate preparations and apparently based on the delusion that North Korea would simply hand over its nuclear weapons. Still, talking is better than bombing, and there was some prospect that the talks could set in motion a process in which North Korea would freeze nuclear and missile tests.

Kim’s apparent destruction of his nuclear test site was a genuinely positive step, notes Siegfried Hecker, an expert on the North Korean nuclear program at Stanford University. It was then a slap in the face for Kim when, just hours later, Trump canceled the June 12 meeting

National Security Advisor John Bolton seems to have played a key role in the cancellation, and he presumably will be an obstacle to setting a new date — for Bolton’s solution to almost any problem seems to be to start a war.