The news that Kim Jong Un launched two “short-range missiles” on Thursday, the latest weapons test for North Korea after a period of diplomatic quiescence, is surely disappointing for Donald Trump, who has built his entire foreign policy around the belief that he can bully, befriend, and then bend the world’s dictators to his will. In the past weeks, however, the president’s cult-of-personality approach to international affairs appears to be faltering—not just on the Korean Peninsula, where tensions are once again rising, but also in South America and the Middle East.

In Venezuela, the Trump administration’s efforts to force out authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro appears to have backfired, both for the Venezuelan opposition, which launched an anemic, failed coup last week, and for Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton. Trump previously recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, and took Bolton’s advice to ramp up pressure on Maduro to leave the country. Now, however, Trump is reportedly fuming that Bolton is trying to get “into a war” that he doesn’t want to fight. (So much for Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatening a “military option.”) Maduro, far from fleeing the country, has responded by detaining political enemies who tried to depose him, solidifying his power, and exposing Trump and Bolton as paper tigers.

The blustery, peace-through-strength approach has hit similar stumbling blocks in Iran, where Bolton is also at the wheel. In recent days the administration has ramped up tensions with Tehran, sending a strike carrier to the region in response to what it called “troubling and escalatory” threats from Iran. “The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces,” Bolton said Sunday in an unusual statement, warning that the U.S. would respond to any provocation with “unrelenting force.”

But the “troubling” intelligence the administration used to justify its saber-rattling was exaggerated by Bolton and other foreign-policy hawks in Trump’s orbit, the Daily Beast reported Tuesday. “It’s not that the administration is mischaracterizing the intelligence,” one U.S. official told the publication, “so much as overreacting to it.” Meanwhile, Iran’s moderates are power as the country’s hardliners grow frustrated with Trump’s insistence on economic sanctions. Amid growing tensions with the U.S., Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced Wednesday that Tehran would no longer adhere to parts of the Iran nuclear deal, the landmark 2015 accord brokered by Barack Obama, which Trump withdrew from last year.

While Bolton beats the war drum in Iran and Venezuela, the administration is flailing to salvage talks in North Korea, once Trump’s favorite foreign-policy success story. (“There is no longer a Nuclear Threat” from Pyongyang,” Trump proudly declared after their summit last June.) When he and Kim met again this year to hash out a more concrete denuclearization plan, however, negotiations broke down before the two sides could even agree on first steps. It didn’t help that Trump repeatedly acknowledged publicly that his threats to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea were all just a ploy. The weapons tests Kim had seemingly put on hold? They started up again last month, with North Korea once more attempting to set the terms of negotiations.

Trump has expressed confidence that a deal will eventually materialize thanks to his “very good” personal relationship with the dictator. But of course, this belies the fact that foreign policy is an unavoidable weak spot for the president. Trump took office without any previous political or military experience beyond vague tough talk about how he “knows more” than the generals. But Trump’s playbook—threaten total annihilation and then quickly cut a deal—has limited effectiveness once rivals catch wise. And, as Trump is struggling to learn, authoritarian government’s tend to have a high threshold for political and economic pain. Kim, Maduro, and Ali Khamenei know they’ll likely still be in power once Trump is gone.

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