Sometimes very bright people can be very stupid indeed. President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John R Bolton graduated from Yale summa cum laude, became a highly regarded attorney and is reputed to have a mind as sharp as a razor. Be that as it may, this week when speaking of North Korea, Bolton demonstrated a markedly blunt intelligence.

In denouncing Kim Jong-un’s nuclear arsenal, he compared the paranoid state to Libya and Iraq, both of whose dictators once harbored nuclear weapons ambitions. The problem with this crass analogy is that both Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein were toppled by the West after they had renounced their nuclear programs. The one factor that has always been obvious about Pyongyang’s acquisition of devastating atomic weapons is that the regime sees their possession as a guarantee that they will be left alone. They deter aggressors while making the outside world listen when North Korea speaks.

Kim’s unexpected opening up to his southern neighbor and the summit talks scheduled with Trump next month in Singapore are clearly part of a process predicated upon the belief that if he can be given rock-solid security guarantees, probably underwritten by Beijing, he can restore his country’s ailing economic fortunes. In return for the decommissioning of his nuclear arsenal, he would expect copious international aid, not least from the United States as well as Japan and, of course, South Korea.

He could present such an outcome as a victory for the hermit kingdom. He and the powerful elite around him could expect serious enrichment during this process and in time might even be prepared to risk easing their draconian control over their people.

As it is, Bolton’s remark has caused Kim to threaten to pull out of his meeting with Trump. Bolton’s defenders are saying that Kim was always likely to make some last minute difficulties. It has been the nature of North Korea’s diplomatic dance with the international community that it regularly takes two steps forward only to take three steps back. Yet even knowing this, Bolton made his deeply crass comparison and gave Kim the perfect excuse to threaten the summit. Kim has said he will not meet Trump if the agenda is to include his regime’s unilateral abandonment of its nuclear weapons.

The White House has rather meekly announced that it hoped that the encounter would still go ahead. Yet when Trump first said he would meet Kim, he emphasized that he would not go if he thought it was going to be a waste of his time. Now Kim’s aggressive response to Bolton’s inept remark would seem to indicate that the summit no longer has any point. The President cannot be pleased that his National Security Advisor may have wrecked what could have been an extraordinary foreign policy triumph.

It must be wondered if Kim and his people have read Trump’s 1987 bestselling book “The Art of the Deal”. Among the advice the real estate mogul gave his readers was to “think big”, “maximize options” and “protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself”. When Kim protested he would not agree to give up his nuclear weapons, he was protecting his downside. But he was careful to say that he opposed “unilateral” disarmament. The upside for him might be the removal of any US tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea and Japan.