“There is no daylight between the president’s policy and that of the ambassador,”NSC spokesman Garrett Marquis told me. “The ambassador is coordinating and working closely with all national-security agencies to provide the president with national-security options and guidance.”

It’s unclear thus far how much of a role Bolton will play going forward in what will clearly be a Secretary of State Mike Pompeo-led negotiating effort. But his quieter role on the North Korea issue doesn’t necessarily mean that he is being disempowered at the NSC. James Carafano, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, pointed out that Bolton overhauled the NSC staff when he entered the administration, replacing a series of staffers with his own people. “It’s Bolton’s NSC, he owns that thing body and soul,” Carafano said.

A senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity downplayed Bolton’s lower profile recently, pointing out that the initiative was being led by Pompeo and that no one wanted a misunderstanding with the North Koreans. “This has been [Pompeo’s] initiative and clearly he’s the face of it and he’s the one who’s been interacting with the North Koreans,” said the official. “John has history with them.”

“He’s been very clear, his views—everybody knows what his views are—it doesn’t matter,” the official said. Bolton “sees himself as very much a personal adviser to the president and not somebody who’s running a mini State Department.”

Bolton has made his position on North Korea abundantly clear over the years. “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) will never give up nuclear weapons voluntarily,” he wrote in his 2007 book, Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations. Just this past February, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in favor of a preemptive strike on North Korea, invoking Daniel Webster and arguing: “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.” In March, Bolton said the summit would be a way to “foreshorten the amount of time that we’re gonna waste in negotiations that will never produce the result we want, which is Kim giving up his nuclear program.”

And in his role as national-security adviser, Bolton recently said on television that “we have very much in mind the Libya model from 2003, 2004,” a reference to the Libya denuclearization process that ended the country’s nuclear program. What Bolton left unsaid was the downfall in 2011 of Libyan autocrat Muammar al-Qaddafi following a U.S.-led intervention.

North Korea took umbrage at what they viewed as a provocative remark by Bolton, with a top foreign-affairs official saying, “The world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fates,” and, of Bolton, “we do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him.” (These were not even the harshest words the North Koreans have had for Bolton; in 2003, a state media article called Bolton “human scum and a bloodsucker.”) Bolton was not the only official to refer to the Libya model; so did Vice President Mike Pence. The plans for a summit nearly broke down, with Trump saying he would pull out after bellicose statements from North Korean officials. Pompeo reportedly blocked Bolton from an Oval Office meeting with a top North Korean official earlier this month, telling Trump it would be “counterproductive.”