There are more imminent foreign policy problems for Donald Trump than North Korea this particular week, but I'm sure we'll have plenty of time to talk about NATO, Trump's visit with the Queen of England, and the summit between Trump and Vladimir Putin in the days to come. For now, I think it's worth turning our attention to the apparent deterioration of the comity between America and North Korea. Trump, a master blusterer if ever there was one, has been overselling what happened between him and Kim Jong Un pretty much since the two men parted in Singapore. He sees the meeting and the agreement as a great achievement, thus he has his own political reasons for praising Kim and the North Koreans. However, the North Koreans are no slouch in the blustering game themselves, as they proved this week by hurling insults and mockery at Mike Pompeo after the first high-level meeting since the Trump-Kim summit. Pompeo appeared blindsided by this bluster, after already having publicly said that it was a productive meeting. So far, Trump has been too busy with other matters (foreign and domestic), and has not really responded to the deterioration in relations. But sooner or later, he's going to have to address it in one way or another. We've seen some potshots, but the full-on battle of the bluster has not yet been truly joined, to extend the metaphor.

Overall, it's looking more and more like Donald Trump essentially got played by Kim Jong Un. Trump met with Kim, and then magnanimously declared that the North Korean nuclear threat no longer existed. Unsurprisingly, this was not true then, is not true now, and will not be true for the foreseeable future.

To fully understand what is going on, we must start with a look at the language of the agreement both men signed in Singapore. At the beginning of this extremely short document is a broad statement of what both countries' goals are:

President Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK [North Korea], and Chairman Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

This is expanded (somewhat, although still in the vaguest-possible terms) into a list of four areas of cooperation. The third item on this list is the crucial one:

Reaffirming the April 27, 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, the DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

So, Kim Jong Un personally has a "firm and unwavering commitment to" while his country "commits to work toward" a goal that is not actually defined anywhere in the document: "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

This phrase is craftily designed to mean completely different things to the two sides of the agreement. To America, this is supposed to mean that North Korea gets rid of its nuclear weapons and its facilities used to build and test such weapons. Also somewhat implicit is that North Korea will at least partially dismantle their missile program as well, at least the part that builds long-range intercontinental missiles. Also implicit (since nothing was really spelled out in the written agreement) is that North Korea will have to verifiably achieve all of this before any sanctions against it are lifted.

However, the phrase is designed to mean something totally different to North Korea. Their original point of view was much like an American president wishfully hoping for a day when nuclear weapons ceased to exist anywhere in the world. North Korea's basic position on its own nuclear forces is pretty close to this -- that they will only relinquish their nukes right after all the other countries in the world do so. This is absurd, of course, but it's an absurd sort of regime. So the Singapore agreement was only one step backwards from their original extreme position on nukes, because what they believe they are committing to is getting rid of their nuclear arsenal right after America promises to remove South Korea (and, implicitly, Japan as well) from under its "nuclear umbrella," while also pledging to never bring any nuclear weapons anywhere near the Korean Peninsula (which, of course, contains both North and South Korea). So North Korea will only get rid of its weapons after the U.S. promises never to use them to defend South Korea. This is also pretty absurd, since it would require a massive change in an American military policy that has remained unchanged since nuclear weapons existed, but this is indeed how the agreement reads to the North Koreans. Indeed, in the more-specific numbered list, North Korea is really only committing to "work toward" this goal -- meaning as long as they're still at the table talking, they've already completely accomplished what they promised to do.

This disconnect is now getting more and more obvious. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just found this out in a big way, after holding talks with the North and then being excoriated afterwards (accused of using "gangster-like" tactics) in the state-run media. But while the insults were what captured the media's attention, the North also sent a message on the basic disagreement with what a "denuclearized Korean Peninsula" actually means. They ripped into America for repeating the same demands as America has consistently demanded in the past, as if somehow we were the ones who were supposed to have changed our basic bargaining position. To the North Koreans, we had indeed agreed to do so and were now not making good on our agreement. To Pompeo, of course, it looked exactly like the North Koreans were actually trying to back out of something previously agreed to.

This is what happens when important diplomatic terms aren't defined, of course. The United States' position has always been for "complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement" of North Korea's nuclear stockpile and its ability to make more nuclear bombs. This "CVID" doctrine has always been at the core of the U.S. position. Furthermore, because North Korea is already known for cheating on such agreements, the inspection process will have to be both robust and fully completed before we lift any sanctions or make any other large concessions to North Korea (like ending the Korean War, for instance).

So it's no wonder we're essentially talking past each other in the negotiations. We've each got our favored definition of what the two leaders actually agreed to, and no progress on any of it will be possible until we can both see eye-to-eye on this basic definition. Everything else follows, really.

President Trump's wrongheaded assurance that the North Korean nuclear threat had evaporated overnight wasn't the only thing he got wrong, of course. Trump and Kim apparently talked about two other issues during their face-to-face meeting, the dismantlement of a missile engine testing facility and the return of American soldiers' remains lost in the Korean War. Since then, Trump has spoken of both of these as if they have already happened, several times. He brags that 200 bodies have been repatriated, but the Pentagon says that figure is actually zero. Pompeo let slip that the dismantling of the plant in question is still under discussion, meaning it won't be destroyed any time soon, even though Trump is convinced this has already happened.

Watching the back-and-forth between Trump, Kim, and their aides is amusing in one respect, at least. Trump is king of the bluster, as we all know. He is a living, walking example of the old T-shirt slogan: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." He brags about the 200 non-existent soldiers' bodies that have come home at his rallies, and his crowds eat it up. But he may have finally met his match in a totalitarian regime with full propaganda control over their own media. North Korea has been playing the game of bluster for decades, remember -- they're experts at explaining to their own people why the rest of the world is headed for doom while the valiant people of North Korea are the shining future of humanity. A few insults about Pompeo can be classified as child's play for such a propaganda machine.

The real question is how Trump will react, once he's done with the other weighty items on his foreign policy calendar (the upcoming NATO meeting, and the summit with his buddy Vladimir Putin). So far, he's obviously been distracted by other matters, including his Supreme Court nomination. But sooner or later Pompeo's going to meet with the North Koreans again, likely with similar results as what just happened. If the North Koreans continue to hurl insults after such meetings, eventually Trump is going to be goaded into reacting.

How he reacts could actually help the process move along, or it could wind up with both parties walking away from the table. Since Trump already gave away much of the store on his first meeting with Kim, it leaves him in the position of being able to make a major move that would just put us all back to the status quo ante. Trump already did this once, with some degree of success. When he threatened to cancel the meeting with Kim, it caused a noticeable effect in the propaganda within North Korea -- an immediate softening of their always-harsh rhetoric. The next time some unnamed North Korean official called us gangsters (or something similar) in their state press, Trump could use this gambit again, stating that unless the North Koreans apologized within 24 hours, Trump would immediately reconvene the joint military exercises with the South Koreans (which both the North Koreans and Trump call "war games"). By initially giving this rather large concession away without getting much of anything in return, Trump does now have the option of reversing course. This wouldn't increase our military posture in any way, it would instead simply return it to where it was before the Singapore meeting. Easy come, easy go, in other words. Doing so runs the risk of completely breaking down the talks between the two countries, but if we are so far apart that we can't even agree what the key phrase means, then further talks without any sort of concessions would really be meaningless.

This is only round one, please remember. We're at the very start of what -- whether successful or not -- will doubtless be a very long and hard process. There's no guarantee that North Korea is ever going to budge an inch, currently. They spent a lot of time, money, and effort to get to where they are now -- seen by the world as an equal to the United States, with a nuclear arsenal to be feared by all. They're not going to walk away from this position easily, if ever. They may make a limited show of blowing some factories up and decommissioning the earliest models of nuclear bombs they produced (the ones that don't work as well as their later efforts, in other words), but complete denuclearization of North Korea will still be a long way off. The battle of the bluster between Trump and the Kim regime is going to continue for some time to come, that's for sure.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant