It should not be forgotten that a slew of previously hawkish Republicans (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared it was “an historic first step in an important negotiation”) and conservative think tankers at the time fell over themselves trying to praise Trump’s summitry. They excused his egregious praise for the brutal dictator and shrugged off Trump’s indifference to the starvation, enslavement and repression of the North Korean people.

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Even worse, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sneered and rebuffed inquiries from Senate Democrats who dared to challenge the president’s success. For months he engaged in the charade that progress was being made and that, despite the clear text of the communique signed at the summit, North Korea really had agree to complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, looks prescient in his disdain for Pompeo’s refusal to come clean on what was and was not agreed upon. His frustration with the failure to deliver a detailed account of the North Korea summit was appropriate, and Pompeo’s lack of detail should have been a blinking red light to lawmakers on both sides.

Frankly, after giving Kim the patina of respectability and allowed sanctions enforcement to fray, the administration is in a far worse position to address Kim’s nuclear weapons program. NBC recently reported, “A top secret U.S. military assessment found that North Korea is still evading U.N. sanctions by transferring oil at sea, and that a coalition of U.S.-led forces deployed to disrupt the movements has failed to dent the overall number of illegal transfers … The finding underscores the Trump administration’s struggle to maintain economic pressure on North Korea amid a diplomatic bid to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear and missile arsenal.”

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Now Trump has to decide whether to return to maximum pressure and to plug the holes in sanctions enforcement, implicitly acknowledging his diplomacy flopped. (From the Times’s story: “The decision Mr. Trump must make now is whether to backtrack on the objective of zero North Korean nuclear weapons even if that means accepting the North as a nuclear-armed state, as the United States has done with Pakistan, India and Israel. Mr. Kim’s speech seemed infused with a sense that Mr. Trump is now facing that critical choice — one the president has never talked about publicly — at a moment of considerable internal disarray, especially at the Pentagon.”)

Finally, one wonders what national security adviser John Bolton must think of a policy approach that he strenuously opposed and now is revealed to be an utter failure. Will he accept a sheepish retreat from Trump’s goal of complete denuclearization, or quit on principle if Trump tries to move the goal posts, as former defense secretary Jim Mattis did when Trump backtracked on Syria and abandoned our allies there?

“Two years into it, Trump’s foreign policy has proven to be an empty shell — a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing with no major accomplishments,” remarks Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress. “North Korea epitomizes the emptiness of Trump’s foreign policy. North Korea hasn’t taken any meaningful steps to address the international community’s concerns about its weapons programs, and it looks like the Trump team has lost the plot in its own policy for North Korea and the broader region. It’s not clear who is minding the store.”

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Fortunately, beginning tomorrow there will be House oversight committees headed by Democrats who will be charged with getting to the bottom of this and other policy initiatives. “Despite the administration’s cheery rhetoric about progress on North Korea, Kim Jong Un himself made clear in his New Year speech that he isn’t committed to denuclearization, at least not under the terms that the Trump Administration has put forward,” Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, tells me. "Secretary Pompeo told me he’d testify before the Foreign Affairs Committee early this year. Our members will certainly want to hear about the apparent lack of progress with North Korea and to remind the administration that Congress needs to be involved in this process — especially if it involves changes to current sanctions law.”