After weeks of cheery rhetoric between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un about the prospect for historic nuclear talks next month, the disconcerting congeniality was punctured on Wednesday when Pyongyang suddenly cast doubt on the summit and placed the blame squarely on National Security Adviser John Bolton. “It is absolutely absurd to compare the D.P.R.K., a nuclear weapons state, to Libya, which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development,” Kim Kye Gwan, the vice foreign minister of North Korea, said in reference to Bolton’s declaration last month that the 2003 disarmament of Libya should be a “model” for the ongoing negotiations. Those remarks had echoed in the State Department, too. The Libya model, as Kim well knows, didn’t end well for Muammar Qaddafi, who was driven out of power in 2011 after an extensive NATO bombing campaign. The Libyan dictator, who had ruled his country with an iron fist for decades, was later found cowering in a drainage pipe; a graphic video of his last moments shows rebel fighters sodomizing him with a bayonet before shooting him. North Korean leadership has long pointed to Libya as precisely the outcome they are trying to avoid by keeping their nuclear program.

Trump himself seemed to misunderstand the import of the diplomatic blowup. “The Libyan model isn’t a model that we have at all, when we’re thinking of North Korea,” the president told reporters Thursday in the Oval Office. “In Libya, we decimated that country, that country was decimated,” he added, appearing to refer to the 2011 military intervention, and not the 2003 disarmament agreement that paved the way for Qaddafi’s ouster. “There was no deal to keep Qaddafi. The Libyan model that was mentioned was a much different deal. This would be with Kim Jong Un, something where he would be there, he’d be in his country, he’d be running his country.” Qaddafi, of course, thought he would be running his country, too.

The White House has cast the dustup as a mistake, suggesting that Bolton went off book. But diplomats who know Bolton say the remark was nothing short of deliberate, given his longtime advocacy for regime change in Pyongyang. “John Bolton is very strategic, very tough, and unlikely to say things unless he’s thought it through,” said a former senior State Department official who worked with Bolton in the Bush administration, where Bolton, as U.N. ambassador, was one of the loudest cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq. A current administration official offered a more blunt assessment of Bolton’s intent. “There is only one reason you would ever bring up Libya to the North Koreans,” the official told me. “And that is to tell them, ‘Warning: don’t go any further because we are going to screw you.’”

While the administration was mostly unified behind Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, signaling a hawkish new orientation in the Middle East, similar negotiations with North Korea have revealed a struggle for influence between two rival power centers. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, no dove himself, has been leading U.S. diplomatic efforts with North Korea, flying to Pyongyang in early April to meet with Kim, and again last week to secure the release of three American hostages. But while Pompeo has offered up measured talking points on North Korea, Bolton, a fierce ideologue with little belief in diplomacy, has been moving the goalposts, telegraphing to Pyongyang that it is no nukes, or no deal. In its statement on Wednesday, the Kim regime signaled that Bolton’s message was received—and a non-starter. “If the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the D.P.R.K.-U.S. summit,” the vice foreign minister said.