Edited by Max J. Rosenthal and Ruby Mellen   BY ISHAAN THAROOR   Dear reader, Today's WorldView will be off Monday for the Memorial Day holiday in the States. We'll be back on Tuesday as usual. Best wishes, Ishaan Trump's canceled North Korea summit sums up his chaotic foreign policy On the Korean Peninsula, the day began with images of North Korea destroying one of its key nuclear testing facilities as a sign of supposed goodwill ahead of talks with the United States. It ended with President Trump blowing up the whole diplomatic process that brought us here. Trump's decision to pull out of the planned June 12 summit in Singapore was a move, like so much of his presidency, cloaked in drama and confusion. The White House issued a letter addressed to North Korea's "Dear Chairman" Kim Jong Un informing Pyongyang that the summit — "for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world" — was off. The seeming incoherence between those consecutive clauses was followed by other bewildering statements in the letter, which was apparently dictated word-for-word by Trump to an aide. It included a schoolyard plug for America's "so massive and powerful" nuclear arsenal, followed by praise for North Korea's "beautiful gesture" in releasing American hostages and an incongruous suggestion to a sitting of head to state to "not hesitate to call me or write" should he change his mind. The reasons for the cancellation are still filtering out, but there are two very different ways to interpret the White House's decision.The first view, as a Washington Post editorial argued, is that it's yet another instance of Trump's impulsive instincts. It was his choice to prematurely announce the planned summit — to the surprise of his South Korean interlocutors — and then wildly play up its prospects even though experts doubted Kim would ever surrender his nuclear weapons and puzzled over Trump's apparent lack of strategic foresight. The president seemed busy speculating that his diplomatic gambit could win him the Nobel Peace Prize; his administration even minted a collector's item coin commemorating the meeting of the two leaders. But a flurry of hostile statements from North Korea this week, and growing fears within the White House that the meeting in Singapore would not see any genuine progress toward North Korean "denuclearization," started to shift Trump's calculus. "White House aides had grown concerned because North Korea had not responded to planning requests on the summit and had canceled a logistics meeting," my colleagues reported. "Many details needed to be settled within days for the summit to happen, this official said, adding that the White House did not want an embarrassing situation of 'losing the upper hand.' " Critics would question what upper hand the United States has at this point. Trump's decision completely blindsided the South Korean government, which has staked a great deal of its credibility on successfully working toward rapprochement with the North. "We are attempting to make sense of what, precisely, President Trump means," said government spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom in Seoul. President Moon Jae-in said he was "very perplexed and sorry" over the turn of events. So, too, are observers in Washington. "Never has such chaos attended the public behavior of a U.S. president on a matter of such gravity," The Post editorial said. "Both Mr. Trump and the North Koreans alluded to the possibility of nuclear war." The second view is that the summit was bound to fail. A key figure here is Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, a noted hawk and skeptic of diplomacy with the North Koreans. For weeks ahead of the meeting, Bolton set impossible targets for the summit and posited a scenario where Pyonygang swiftly dismantled its nuclear program in the same vein as the Libyan regime of despot Moammar Gaddafi in 2003. "Bolton appeared to be willing to settle for nothing other than Kim showing up to Singapore to turn over the keys to his nuclear program — which North Korea has recently taken to calling its 'treasured sword' — to the United States," explained Asia geopolitics expert Ankit Panda. "Bolton’s preferred model all this time has been the 2003 disarmament of Libya, which at the time had a nuclear-weapons program that was effectively in a primordial state and was dismantled by the United States." Of course, as we discussed before, the "Libyan model" is an unwelcome analogy in Pyongyang, given how that story ended with the overthrow of the nuclear-free Gaddafi regime in 2011, and the brutal killing of its leader. "There are several land mines on the way to the summit between North Korea and the U.S.,” Chung Dong-young, a liberal South Korean politician, told my colleague Anna Fifield last week. “One of those land mines just exploded: John Bolton." Nevertheless, in the days that followed, both Trump and Vice President Pence invoked Libya in their remarks, with Trump explicitly (and rather confusingly) warning Kim that Gaddafi's fate could be his should he not denuclearize. The intellectual "dysfunction within this administration in the lead-up to this meeting ultimately brought the summit crashing down," concluded Panda. So what did Trump gain from the gambit? For a president invested in the "art" of the deal, he rather theatrically got to walk away from one, while still securing the release of U.S. prisoners and leaving the door vaguely ajar for a future round of talks with Kim. (North Korea said it was willing to meet with Trump "at any time.") But he also opened the door for more chaos. Trump now has to patch up ties with South Korea and, to a lesser extent, Japan, two allies that will undoubtedly be wary of Trump's future initiatives in the region. "Leaving the [Iranian] nuclear deal created a wedge with European allies," tweeted Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser at the State Department. "Leaving the North Korea summit will draw a wedge with South Korea." And it likely plays into the hands of China, which has also been outmaneuvering Trump in a long-rumbling trade dispute. Meanwhile, Trump undermined his new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who, starting while he was CIA director, made two secret trips to North Korea and shifted his initially hard-line stance to one championing engagement. "Pompeo could lose credibility, not just with Kim, but with any world leader who now can’t be sure he speaks for the president," wrote my colleague Josh Rogin. "Pompeo himself must now pivot from his optimistic rhetoric about bringing North Korea into the 21st century and toe the more hawkish, Bolton line of pushing more sanctions all the time." What that means is a return to the old status quo, albeit one where the United States has less leverage. The absence of the summit may deprive Kim of a new platform to boost his international visibility and legitimacy, but he still has his nuclear weapons and has emerged in the past few months as a more emboldened figure, ending more than half a decade of seclusion with two trips to China. Trump's stated campaign of "maximum pressure" on North Korea has weakened. “Trump walking away from the summit lets North Korea meet all its objectives: public recognition, lighter sanctions, damage to U.S. alliances and continued nuclear advancement,” Adam Mount, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, told the New York Times. What happens next is anyone's guess. A humbled Trump administration could pursue more moderate goals, such as an agreement from Pyongyang not to carry out further missile or nuclear tests. But Trump could just as easily go back to his saber-rattling bluster of the previous year, while Kim resumes missile launches — returning the focus once more to the grim prospect of war.

• What would war with North Korea look like? Mark Fitzpatrick of the Institute for International and Strategic Studies games it out in an interactive op-ed for the New York Times. “The results of any American military action against North Korea could be disastrous. To truly understand the consequences of what such a strike would mean, click through the options presented below,” he writes in the piece’s introduction, which begins a month from now with a scenario that sees Trump resuming his bellicose rhetoric and North Korea resuming missile tests. You choose your own grim adventure from there. “This is an exercise based on what we know about American policy, North Korea’s military and the strategic calculus of Northeast Asia,” explains Fitzpatrick. “It isn’t a sure thing, but it should make clear pretty quickly that the outcome of war on North Korea will be bad, worse or much, much worse.” • Anna Fifield has more on the apparent demolition of a North Korean nuclear testing site, which was witnessed by a tightly-controlled delegation of foreign journalists: “The fact that Kim’s regime went ahead with the destruction of the Punggye-ri nuclear testing site appeared to signal it was still willing to embark on a diplomatic journey with the United States…. “Journalists brought to the North’s testing site reported powerful blasts there. But the Kim regime did not allow any experts to observe the events, making it difficult to assess what exactly it had done. Most analysts remain highly doubtful North Korea is really prepared to give up its nuclear weapons program… “There remains a considerable amount of skepticism about Thursday’s events, given that North Korea invited foreign media to film the spectacular destruction of the cooling tower at the Yongbyon nuclear plant in 2008, part of a denuclearization deal that was meant to cut off North Korea’s access to plutonium.” • A Dutch-led international team of investigators said Thursday that the missile that downed a Malaysia Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014 came from the Russian military. It opened the possibility that Dutch prosecutors could sue the Kremlin in connection with the attack that killed all 298 on board, reported my colleague Michael Birnbaum. Here’s more: “The long-running inquiry already had established that a Russian-made Buk antiaircraft missile downed Flight 17, but it had not previously made a direct link to the Russian military. The Kremlin always has denied involvement in the incident. “Criminal charges against the Russian military or Russia’s government probably would exacerbate tensions between the Kremlin and the West even further, implicating Russian officials in the deaths of European tourists on their way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The attack on July 17, 2014, led to a crushing round of Western sanctions against Russia.” • Giuseppe Conte, an academic tapped to become Italy’s prime minister, is on the path to forming a new government, based on a coalition of two anti-establishment populist parties. The Atlantic’s Rachel Donadio has a rather bleak reading of what may follow as the political neophyte and two renegade factions take the reins of power: “Italy is a highly complex country in which deeply embedded, neo-feudal power networks intersect with political currents in ways that have long defied the right-versus-left divide that makes other European countries far more straightforward. But what’s unique about this new Italian coalition and makes it unprecedented in Italian political history is that it scrambles the traditional divide between opposition and majority. Instead of an opposition party using anti-establishment rhetoric to win a majority, today’s Italian populists believe the establishment per se is ‘an intractable caste’ whose power should be reined in, as Nadia Urbinati, a political science professor at Columbia University, wrote recently in La Repubblica… “But no matter how poorly the mainstream parties played their own political hands, there’s a bigger shift here, and it’s maybe about revenge. A decade since the start of the euro crisis, many citizens in Italy find the economic situation too complex to understand, but they do understand that their salaries have barely risen in two decades, that they have to move abroad to find work if they’re ambitious, or, if they live in the South, resign themselves to the fact that there may actually never be jobs, hence the desire for a basic income. They wanted something different. They wanted to vote out their leaders. No matter that the new leaders may be even worse than the old ones.”