President Donald Trump has squandered any chance of making a deal with North Korea and Kim Jong Un.

Trump's meetings with Kim gave North Korea legitimacy while the US gained nothing.

There may be handshakes and meetings in the future, but the chance of a meaningful deal is dead.

Brett Bruen was the director of global engagement in the Obama White House and a career American diplomat. He runs the crisis-communications agency Global Situation Room.

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We may see more love letters exchanged. There may even be another splashy summit in our future. I'm not ruling out a few clever twists and dramatic turns. But let's be honest: The chance of a nuclear deal with North Korea is pretty much dead.

I don't doubt that President Donald Trump will dangle the possibility of peace in an attempt to drum up some positive publicity. He will continue to speak of a cringe-inducing, uncommon bond that has developed with his pal in Pyongyang. But it's time we take a step back.

Let's take a hard look at where we are and what's actually happening on the ground. Hold the Champagne — this administration's most prominent play for the Nobel Peace Prize is going to come up way short.

It never had much hope. I say that with great difficulty. It wasn't as though I wished it to fail. To the contrary, there was an early indication that this peace process was going to represent the revival of American diplomacy after its struggle for relevance with the "America First" crowd. Some thought that through these negotiations, Trump would perhaps come to learn the value of our foreign-policy experts.

Nope. The president pretty much pushed past the diplomats. Even his favorite Cabinet member, Mike Pompeo, got shoved aside; the secretary of state was mercilessly skewered by the North Koreans and even coldly stood up on a visit to Pyongyang.

Trump didn't much mind the slights. The president continued to lavish praise on Kim Jong Un and the process. This only served to further undermine the State Department's efforts to advance diplomatic discussions. The North Koreans knew they could just hold out for the man in the Oval Office.

In diplomacy, you normally want to have the deal baked ahead of the summit. Get the oven heated to 425 degrees before you go to the trouble of putting on a big show.

Any meeting involving the president of the United States — let alone a summit — is a really big prize for a foreign leader. If you're an American negotiator, you use that to your advantage to get key concessions out of your counterparts.

Trump skipped over those steps. He wanted to rush into the grip-and-grin. The challenge was that once you conferred international legitimacy on Kim, it would be pretty darn difficult to get him to cede more ground.

I will acknowledge that Trump did not, as some feared, accept a terrible, no good, very bad deal. The president walked away from the summit in Vietnam when it became obvious, even to him, how far apart they stood. It was a relief that he didn't sell the whole farm for a cheap campaign talking point.

He incorrectly assessed that the North Koreans were desperate for sanctions relief or even enamored of his talk of new skyscrapers going up across their dark capital. The problem is that while there's suffering across the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, Kim and the ruling elites live large. They also knew that when Washington gave ground, Beijing, Moscow, and others would be able to ease their own reluctantly imposed sanctions.

So where are we? Despite three meetings over a year, Trump has failed to secure even a single significant concession from the North Korean leader. He got a few minor ones, like the temporary halting of missile tests. But by now those commitments have evaporated. We are behind square one, having given away some of our biggest legitimization incentives and gotten nothing in return.

What happens now?

No matter how many missiles North Korea fires off, it seems Trump will continue to fire off tweets about the tantalizing, promising prospects of a deal. But he and his team are being badly outplayed.

The tweets and the letters aren't bringing us any closer to peace. Nor are the summits and the steps into the demilitarized zone. All they are doing is strengthening Kim's position and power.

There is a point at which we need to recognize that the current strategy is not working. We are there. It's time to accept reality and not get sucked into a reality-show drama. It's time to downgrade the talks. It's time to demand progress, not just promises. It's time to accept that peace may be a lot further off than we were led to believe.

Even President George W. Bush wisely observed: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again."

Trump's defenders are likely to say it was worth a shot. Maybe. But I believe historians will judge him more harshly. Seldom has a president waded into negotiations with so little help. Seldom have we given away so much and gotten so little. Seldom has an American leader boasted so much and managed to achieve so little.

Brett Bruen was the director of global engagement in the Obama White House and a career American diplomat. He runs the crisis-communications agency Global Situation Room and teaches crisis management at Georgetown.