In Choe Sang-hun’s typically thorough coverage of this weekend’s Pompeo visit to Pyongyang for the New York Times, he offers one possible explanation for North Korean behavior: that the regime has not “changed its decades-old negotiating strategy, which often involves making pledges that it fails to carry out.”

Yet there is a quite different interpretation of recent events: that the Singapore summit generated an outline of the negotiation process that strongly favored the North Korean approach, and the Trump administration has effectively been forced to reset its negotiating strategy.

This interpretation also suggests both the peril and promise of