North Korea marked the second anniversary of the Singapore summit by declaring diplomacy with the U.S. dead:

North Korea on Friday said that two years of diplomacy with President Trump had “faded away into a dark nightmare,” and vowed to increase its nuclear weapons capabilities.

“Even a slim ray of optimism for peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula has faded away into a dark nightmare,” the country’s foreign minister, Ri Son-gwon, said in a statement on Friday marking the second anniversary of a historic summit meeting between Mr. Trump and the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

The danger of Trump’s pseudo-engagement has always been that it could never lead to a substantive agreement, and then when it inevitably failed it would sabotage any chance for real negotiations. The souring of U.S.-North Korean relations has also undermined President Moon’s engagement policy, which is now on life support as North Korea has cut off communications with Seoul. Pretending to pursue a diplomatic solution without doing any of the legwork or preparation needed to make diplomacy successful ended up producing nothing more than high-profile photo ops, and it tantalized the North Koreans with the possibility of sanctions relief without delivering on it.

The president wanted the spectacle of summits, but refused to do any of the work that would be required to secure meaningful concessions. He was never willing to settle for a modest arms control agreement, and he kept listening to the bad faith advice of hawks who urged him to demand a “big deal” that North Korea would never accept. The administration’s North Korea policy was the result of the president’s vanity and his instinct to side with hard-liners and maximalists. In the years to come, hawks are going to try using this fake engagement as a reason to oppose the real thing.

The reason for the impasse is the same as ever. The Trump administration remains wedded to a fantasy of North Korean disarmament, and that is something that North Korea has never had any intention of doing:

Although Washington continues to make “nonsensical remarks that the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is still a secure goal of the United States,” North Korea’s strategic goal is “to build up a more reliable force to cope with the long-term military threats from the U.S.,” Mr. Ri said​ on Friday​.

Many hawkish critics have faulted Trump’s effort because it supposedly gave away too much to North Korea in exchange for nothing. It is a measure of how badly the policy has failed that the North Koreans feel the same way:

“In retrospect,” Mr. Ri said on Friday, all Washington has been doing was “accumulating its political achievements.”

“Never again will we provide the U.S. chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns,” he said.

It seems clear that the failure of Trump’s North Korea policy will make it much more difficult for a future administration to reenter negotiations with their government. Making impossible demands and refusing to offer even meager concessions have been the defining features of Trump’s “maximum pressure” policies, and they have predictably yielded nothing but greater antagonism and distrust.