Inside official Washington, the revelation of a secret meeting at the end of last month between Mike Pompeo and North Korean despot Kim Jong Un was almost as surprising for who led the U.S. delegation as for the fact that it happened at all. Ordinarily, the secretary of state would be expected to have made the clandestine journey to Pyongyang, as Madeleine Albright did at the turn of the century. Instead, with nuclear diplomacy between the United States and North Korea at the most precarious—and promising—point in decades, President Donald Trump dispatched his outgoing C.I.A. director, a former congressman with little diplomatic experience. Of course, there is little that is ordinary about the Trump administration, which currently has no permanent secretary of state at all. “If the State Department was fully staffed, up and running with expertise on the issue, then yeah, it would be a little bit strange to have the C.I.A. doing it,” Robert Carlin, a former U.S. intelligence officer and State Department adviser on North Korea negotiations, told me. “But that’s not the case, so somebody had to fill the vacuum . . . You use the tools that you have.”

The episode undoubtedly boosted Pompeo, who is currently awaiting Senate confirmation to take over the State Department from the unceremoniously axed Rex Tillerson. But among veteran foreign-policy hands, the C.I.A. director’s advance-man trip exposed critical fractures within an administration that has struggled to make use of Foggy Bottom’s diplomatic corps. “They have been completely sidelined from foreign policy, certainly in the last six months—if not the last year,” said a senior administration official familiar with the situation. “Tillerson was an afterthought when these decisions were being made.” And, as a current State Department staffer explained, nothing is likely to change until the president’s most recent Cabinet shake-up comes to a stop. “Until Pompeo comes on board it is like a waiting game,” they told me. “State is just out in the pastures.”

Indeed, the circumstances of the Pompeo-Kim meeting were primarily a function of timing. Tillerson was fired just days after Trump agreed to meet with Kim, leaving Pompeo—nominated by Trump to be Tillerson’s successor—to take the lead on the administration’s negotiations with Pyongyang. As The Washington Post first reported, Pompeo made contact through a back channel between the C.I.A. and its North Korean intelligence counterpart, the Reconnaissance General Bureau. On his visit to North Korea over Easter, Pompeo was reportedly accompanied by a small group of C.I.A. officials, but no one from the White House or the State Department. According to an administration official, Trump’s decision to tap Pompeo to meet with Kim was less about his role as spy chief than his close personal relationship with the former Tea Party lawmaker. “The relationships that we have built with the North Koreans in anticipation of any kind of summit have been more of a personality-driven tasking to Pompeo than necessarily a C.I.A.-is-leading-this tasking,” the official told me. “I think the president, in the absence of Tillerson and in the absence of other options and in the presence of a close tie that he feels to Pompeo and a trust he has in Pompeo—I think this has kind of been handed to Pompeo.”

Of course, nothing is permanent in Trumpworld. The larger question hanging over the upcoming North Korea summit—tentatively planned for late May or early June—is whether Pompeo continues to take point as he tangles with Trump’s equally ambitious national security adviser, John Bolton, a notorious war hawk who has advocated for a pre-emptive military strike. “I think [given] Bolton’s outlook on North Korea, which is well-known because he has written about it extensively, it wouldn’t be surprising if his lack of enthusiasm about a diplomatic solution to the North Korea problem doesn’t get in the way of this process going forward,” said Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who has engaged North Korean officials in unofficial discussions. “It does beg to question whether he’s the right person to be the president’s national security adviser at this time.”

The issue could hasten a turf war between Bolton and Pompeo, which some worry could flare into a battle royale. “You can’t have a strong national security adviser and a strong secretary of state. Naturally, that has never happened in history,” Andrew Bowen, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told me recently. Pompeo has a head start, having opened the talks with Kim, but he will also be inheriting a depleted State Department from Tillerson, lacking several layers of senior leadership. But Bolton, as I reported earlier this month, has a tactile understanding of interagency levers of power, having served as an undersecretary of state in the second Bush administration and as ambassador to the United Nations. He is also infamously aggressive when it comes to getting what he wants. “Bolton is not a big team player. He made that pretty clear when he came in,” the current State staffer quipped. Upon his arrival at the White House last week, Bolton ousted a string of high-profile staffers including Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert, Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy Nadia Schadlow, N.S.C. spokesman Michael Anton, and Deputy National Security Adviser Ricky Waddell. On Monday, Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, also stepped down. (Morale at the N.S.C. is “very, very low,” the administration official told me. “I think it is a bit of confusion, a bit of nervousness, but certainly a chaotic sense. I think unfortunately morale is either approaching or probably already at the levels it was at under General [Mike] Flynn.”)

Pompeo’s entanglement with the Senate may give Bolton an opening to take over interagency coordination on North Korea, if he can get the N.S.C. under control. “The first problem is that the bureaucracy is very broad and wide and different people have different ideas, and you need somebody to bring it all together,” Carlin explained. But Trump’s West Wing is full of strong personalities, including United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Defense Secretary James Mattis. And if there is “any ambiguity in the policy left in place by the president,” the administration official told me, those personalities could clash. “I think where you might run into an issue is if you try to have all three—a strong secretary of defense, secretary of state, and national security adviser—publicly at least,” the official said. “I think national security adviser is a role that kind of nestles into both the State world and the Defense world, but if you have both of them kind of pushing back, and a strong national security adviser, that is where you start seeing tension.”

It is a strange twist of fate that Trump appears to have the best chance of any U.S. president to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula. Despite his hair-raising propensity for brinkmanship, Trump’s reflexive disregard for the status quo may actually work to his advantage. Yes, critics say, meeting with Kim will give him the legitimacy he craves, and there are plenty of reasons to doubt North Korea would give up its nuclear program without unacceptable concessions on the presence of American troops in South Korea. Then again, nothing else has worked, so why not this? Indeed, the South Koreans are now offering assurances that the Kim regime has agreed to broaching the possibility of denuclearization. And next week, Kim is expected to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. “The South Koreans wouldn’t be talking about denuclearization being on the agenda unless they felt certain about it,” said DiMaggio. “I know some have suggested that this was more wishful thinking on the part of the South Koreans. But after multiple meetings, preparatory meetings between senior officials from both North and South, I think it is safe to assume that they reached an understanding that denuclearization will be on the agenda.”

Still, there is much left to iron out—and neither Trump nor Pompeo have ever engaged in such sensitive talks. “You still need skilled diplomats to engage in the negotiations, because it is a different skill set,” DiMaggio added. “To sit at the table across from what some would call our enemy does require a certain amount of skill and negotiation, and that is not necessarily something you can just make up on the fly. I think if Mr. Pompeo is smart, he would put together a team that includes people with a range of skills including negotiators, but also technical experts, nuclear experts, and so forth.”

Carlin, who went with former secretary of state Albright on her historic trip to meet with Kim Jong Il in the final months of the Clinton administration, agrees. “You don’t know what the North Koreans are going to agree to until you actually try it out. Kim Jong Un has some pretty big ideas apparently . . . Look at how he’s handled this thing in the last three months. It’s not some kid who has no experience and who doesn’t know what he’s doing. This has been pretty high-flying diplomacy,” he told me. “It’s put everybody off balance, and has allowed him to move from people’s view of him as radical and untested to somebody who goes around to various places, appears with his wife and his sisters, sends out messages, engages with South Koreans . . . He may have a lot of things up his sleeve.”

There is a concern that Trump—who reportedly views the upcoming summit as his “Great Man” Moment to change the course of history—is setting his expectations too high, and that there will be a lack of clarity following the summit, putting the U.S.-North Korea relationship on a fast track to a military confrontation. “One of the dangers that traditional diplomats will see here, and I am among them, if you are not systematic in the way that you plan, then when the principles get together, what they agree to can be both unpredictable—that is not necessarily bad—[but also] very murky or even contradictory,” a former senior U.S. official recently told me. “If [Trump] expects that the nuclear issue could be resolved quickly and with the stroke of a pen, like an executive order,” DiMaggio said, “that, certainly, is not going to be the case.”

Even Trump has conceded that the talks might fall apart. “If I think that it’s a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we’re not going to go,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this week. “If the meeting, when I’m there, is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting.” It’s at that point, of course, that the Pompeo-Bolton schism could have dire human consequences. Pompeo, a former Army captain with who has called for regime change in North Korea, is hardly averse to exercising military force. More recently, however, he has sought to reassure Washington that he believes in the power of diplomacy to avoid what experts say would be a catastrophic war. Bolton, meanwhile, is practically salivating at the prospect. “Talking to the North Koreans is a waste of time,” he told Fox Business Network in January, accusing the Kim regime of trying to buy time to build more weapons. The United States, Bolton said, faces with a “binary choice”: learn to live with a nuclear North Korea, or war. “Those are not attractive options, but that’s where we’re headed.” At no point did he suggest that he thought diplomacy could work, or should even be attempted. “Now they just need a little more time, and now they want to talk? Give me a break.”