Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury, and a frequent critic of the president’s North Korea policy, expressed a similar frustration with how Trump’s impetuousness may have damaged a once-in-a-generation opportunity for peace. “I think their view is very straightforward,” he said. “North Korea was under threat from the United States until the day it tested the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States. And from their view, what happened within months of doing that? The president of the United States flew to Singapore to meet with the leader of North Korea.” When Trump misconstrued Kim’s intentions, declaring that the denuclearization process had begun, the stage was set for the sort of conflict that derailed Pompeo last week.

By overstating the Singapore Declaration, in other words, Trump handed Kim the leverage to negotiate as if North Korea had already won many of the concessions it was seeking. “The United States is supposed to start giving the North Koreans more of what they want, and reducing the pressure on the North Koreans because the die is cast, right?” Lewis said. “What they are willing to offer is: if the United States is nice to North Korea, then they will stop threatening the United States with nuclear weapons. They will stop doing provocative tasks, they will enjoy the newfound era of security that their nuclear weapons provide, and they will be very nice and easy to get along with. That is what they are offering.”

Pompeo, recognizing how Trump’s public posture warped the expectations game, is now trying to reset the board. But it may be too late to stop the forces the Singapore summit already set in motion. While the U.S. is stepping back, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is racing forward with his efforts to secure peace with Kim. “We have a big problem coming with South Korea,” a senior official involved in the talks recently told Daniel Sneider, a lecturer in East-Asian studies at Stanford University, who wrote a widely discussed column on the topic for Tokyo Business Today. “It has reached the point where the South Koreans are determined to press ahead. They no longer feel the need to act in parallel with us.”

Among Moon’s plans that could hurt Pompeo’s bargaining power is the establishment of a liaison office north of the militarized border between North and South Korea, which U.S. officials say might be a violation of sanctions. “He’s walked out on a plank, and he’s over an abyss,” said Lawrence Wilkerson, a former United States Army colonel who served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “I’ve seen this before. I've seen it twice before. And then suddenly, it all comes crashing down, and we go back to the same thing we were doing before”—threatening fire and fury, instead of moving toward peace.

“The complication here is that POTUS overhyped and overpromised on the Singapore summit.”

Wit, the former North Korea nuclear negotiator, urged restraint as the process works itself out, particularly from journalists who expect diplomacy to unfold at the pace of the cable news cycle. “If it doesn’t happen overnight, everyone gets impatient and everyone gets hypercritical,” he said. “It’s not gonna happen overnight. If everyone thinks it’s gonna happen overnight, then we might as well just pack it up and go home.”

Still, there are real doubts as to whether any amount of time will allow Trump to safely grapple with the fact that he fell for the same shenanigans as his predecessors, especially against the backdrop of heightening tensions with China and the midterm elections. “It looks as if Trump has zero knowledge about how to deal with the relations of nations, as we used to call ‘international relations,’” Wilkerson told me. “If you’ve promised what you promised to the base, and the base is feeling good because you achieved something in Singapore, and then all of a sudden, it looks like you haven’t achieved something—you better react to that, and you have to go back to your bombast, and you have to go back to your previous tactics, which were to deny that anything’s gone wrong first. And then when it looks like something may have gone wrong, you’ve got to start looking like you’re responding to it.”

Last June, at a press conference shortly after the Singapore summit, Trump conceded that if North Korea didn’t live up to its word, he would likely find “some kind of an excuse” rather than admit he was wrong about Kim. Now, as those talks hit a wall, Trump’s sense of infallibility is being put to the test. Perhaps more worrisome is the possibility that Trump will see in the collapsing relationship an opportunity to distract from the other scandals plaguing his presidency. The all-consuming Russia investigation has, on the one hand, drained the mental and emotional energies of a White House in short supply of either resource. It is also a reminder that the greatest political crisis in Washington is one of Trump’s own making. Reaching for foreign-policy achievements to distract from his troubles at home, Trump declared mission accomplished with Kim Jong Un with little consideration beyond immediate political gain. Now, as Trump’s prospects dim on both domestic and international fronts, the odds grow that one setback will precipitate another.