In his rush to reach a disarmament agreement with North Korea, Donald Trump appears to have badly misjudged his adversary, Kim Jong Un. As multiple State Department sources have told me, U.S. demands that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons were always going to be a nonstarter for Kim. Nevertheless, Trump appeared to misinterpret Kim’s overtures, relayed via South Korean President Moon Jae-in, that he would unilaterally disarm, and was reportedly “surprised” and “angered” last week when North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator released a statement to that effect. According to The New York Times, Trump now believes he may have made a mistake in agreeing to meet with Kim, and worries that the summit could become a political embarrassment. “It doesn’t look like they want to denuclearize at all,” one U.S. official told The Washington Post, after Trump made a frantic call to Moon. “The North’s attitude is a pretty long distance away from what it appeared to be as Moon portrayed.”

Diplomats and North Korea experts, however, say this was entirely predictable. “Kim Jong Un has not offered to give up his nuclear weapons. He has not done that. He has never said anything remotely close to that,” Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury College, told me recently. “What he has said is that he is willing to endorse the kind of vague principle of the elimination of nuclear weapons.” But Trump, in his excitement over the prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize, inflated his expectations for the June 12 summit. As Korea expert Victor Cha noted, Kim had “not even reaffirmed the more definitive statements about denuclearization that were used by the North Koreans in the past,” during previous negotiations with Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “It all sounds good if you are not aware of what North Korea’s strategy is. North Korea in the end, they do want a peace treaty, and they do want normalization, but they want those things as a nuclear-weapon state. . . . They’re willing to part with some of their capability, but they’re certainly not willing to part with all of it.”

It is not clear, exactly, how this message got lost, or whether Trump merely misunderstood the context of the negotiations. White House aides told the Times they are concerned the president does not understand the elements of North Korea’s nuclear program—details with which Kim is intimately familiar—and that Trump “has resisted the kind of detailed briefings about enrichment capabilities, plutonium reprocessing, nuclear weapons production and missile programs that Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush regularly sat through.” With a shallow bench of foreign-policy experts on his team (there is currently no U.S. ambassador to South Korea, after Victor Cha’s nomination was scuttled earlier this year), much of the planning has fallen to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—the former C.I.A. director—and to national security adviser John Bolton, who has repeatedly advocated for regime change in Pyongyang. Several diplomats who know Bolton have told me they believe Bolton was purposefully trying to sabotage the prospect for peace when he remarked last month that the denuclearization of North Korea should follow the “Libya model”—a 2003 disarmament agreement that left Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi vulnerable to a 2011 NATO bombing campaign that ended with his death. (“There is only one reason you would ever bring up Libya to the North Koreans,” a current administration official told me. “And that is to tell them, ‘Warning: don’t go any further because we are going to screw you.’”)

According to the Times, Bolton has told Trump that he should push Kim to give up his entire nuclear arsenal and infrastructure before lifting economic sanctions, a precondition that most analysts view as wildly unrealistic. As multiple foreign-policy experts have told me, however, the best hope for a peace settlement would be an arrangement in which North Korea agrees to turn over some of its nuclear capacity and suspend testing, in exchange for limited U.S. withdrawal from the region.