HANOI – In the end, President Trump did the unexpected: He walked away.

A visibly deflated Trump began the press conference wrapping up his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by talking about anything else. He riffed on the potentially nuclear crisis between India and Pakistan. The violent crackdown in Venezuela.

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Only then did Trump turn to the subject at hand: why, after weeks of buildup, flattery and reality TV-style showmanship, his negotiations with the North Korean leader had come to an abrupt halt.

There were signs, around midday, that things were starting to go sideways.

A working lunch between the two negotiating teams was scrapped. So was a ceremony intended to mark the signing of a joint agreement between the two countries. Plans for setting up a liaison office in North Korea, which the two leaders discussed in front of reporters on Wednesday, never materialized.

At around 12:45 p.m. Hanoi time, it became clear the summit was ending with no deal when the White House announced a “program change” and moved up the press conference by two hours, telling reporters the president would appear at 2:00 p.m. rather than at 4:00 p.m. as initially planned. Audible murmurs spread through the buses where the White House press corps was corralled en route to the press conference.

The president had teased the idea that the summit would yield big results. But leaving without a deal was always an option under consideration, according to a senior administration official.

Before the summit, the United States special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, told the president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Trump needed to be able to walk away without a deal, this official said.

The president did just that. He did not appear pleased about the course change, speaking in a monotone and repeatedly kicking questions over to Pompeo. Trump attributed the summit’s collapse to Kim’s demands for full and immediate sanctions relief — a concession the president said he wasn’t willing to make for the partial denuclearization the North Korean leader was willing to offer.

“It was about the sanctions,” Trump said. “Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted, in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that. They were willing to denuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted but we couldn’t give up all of the sanctions for that. … We had to walk away from that particular suggestion.”

Asked whether it was his decision to walk away from the negotiating table, the president declined to say. “Sometimes you have to walk and this was just one of those times,” Trump said.

While the outcome was unexpected, experts said they were not entirely surprised. “This is Trump world with the president center stage. So it’s not traditional diplomacy. The key issue is what happens next. He seems invested in a negotiation so stay tuned,” said Joel Wit, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and an expert on Northeast Asian security.

The president’s willingness to leave Hanoi without a deal came as a relief to some of his aides, who had expressed concern in the days leading up to the summit that the president — eager to divert attention from his ballooning domestic troubles, which flared Wednesday as his former fixer decried him as a con man, a liar and a cheat before a House panel — would trade major concessions for empty promises.

The outcome also suggested the president is committed to seeing North Korea denuclearize before offering sanctions relief, which he and his aides view as the only significant leverage they have over the North Koreans.

That said, the president declined to say whether he was willing to let Kim hang on to some of his nuclear weapons or whether he remained committed to the original goal established by his negotiating team: the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea. Asked whether that remained his policy, he replied, “I don’t want to say that to you because I don’t want to put myself in that position from the standpoint of negotiation.”

In their talks, Kim had offered to dismantle Yongbyon, the country’s main nuclear site, but refused to go further. North Korea has continued to built out more than a dozen other missile sites since Kim pledged to work toward denuclearization at his first meeting with Trump in Singapore last June, a development cited by many outside experts as a sign Pyongyang wasn’t serious about giving up its nukes.

“I want to take sanctions off so badly,” the president said, but he concluded that Kim’s Yongbyon offer, “while very big, it wasn’t enough to do what we were doing. … We had to have more than that.”

Trump conceded that the two leaders did not manage to establish a shared definition of denuclearization, but put a positive gloss on the discovery. “He has a certain vision,” the president said. “It’s not exactly our vision, but it’s a lot closer than it was a year ago.”

But overall, Trump’s search for positive signs was overshadowed by the speed of his exit and the contrast between Thursday’s outcome and his usual habit of declaring victory, no matter the outcome. A leader who typically enjoys the confrontational give-and-take with the news media limited his press conference to just 38 minutes this time — the one in Singapore ran 70 minutes.

Though the president’s remarks were briefer and less feisty than normal, there was a flash of the old Trump. He gave a shoutout to his favorite Fox News host in the middle of the event — “Sean Hannity. What are you doing here, Sean Hannity?” — and then called on him to ask a question.

Hannity compared the president’s decision to walk away from the negotiating table to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland — talks that collapsed at the last minute when the two leaders failed to reach an agreement on “single word,” as Reagan put it at the time.

At Trump’s side throughout the event was Pompeo, and the president tossed more than one question to his top diplomat, who has invested much of his time and prestige, going back to his stint as CIA director, in the talks with North Korea.

“I’m going to let Mike speak about that,” Trump said, later suggesting that he might have been willing to with cut an agreement North Korea despite Pompeo’s doubts. “I could’ve done a deal today, but it would’ve been a deal that I wouldn’t have been happy about, Mike wouldn’t have been happy about.”

Trump’s tone was a striking shift from the optimism he had expressed only hours earlier. At times in Hanoi, he almost seemed ready to ditch his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan and get behind “Make North Korea Great Again.”

“No matter what happens, we’ll have a deal that’s really good for Chairman Kim and his country,” the president told reporters Thursday morning as he sat across the table from his North Korean counterpart.

In fact, Trump insisted the talks’ unsuccessful conclusion had done nothing to dent his friendly relationship with the 35-year-old dictator. “There’s a warmth that we have,” he said. “He’s quite a guy and quite a character.”

And he insisted Kim bore no responsibility for the death of Otto Warmbier, an American student imprisoned in North Korea. “He felt very badly about it,” Trump said. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.”

Foreign Policy

This year’s agenda reflects a stark shift in conservative priorities — and Russia is missing.

Last year, the title of a panel at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference posed a simple question — “What is the Biggest Threat to the U.S.?” — and offered three options: China, Russia or rogue states like North Korea.

Now, the results are in. “China, the global menace,” warns the title of one panel at this year’s conference. “21st Century terminator: How China is using 5G and AI to take over the world,” warns another. A third China-focused panel borrows its title from a book by Winston Churchill about the runup to World War II. The words “Russia,” “Iran,” “North Korea” and “terrorism” do not appear on this year’s agenda.

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The Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, which runs Wednesday through Saturday, serves as the premiere annual gathering of right-leaning activists and offers a barometer of trends in conservative thinking.

This year’s sudden focus on China marks a moment of flux for conservative foreign policy priorities. The Islamic State is crippled, al-Qaida is quiet and public fear of terrorism is at a recent low. Meanwhile President Donald Trump, whose campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with the Kremlin, says the U.S. can befriend Russia and polls show that the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, has grown more popular among Republicans since Trump’s election.

The new emphasis also reflects a desire on the part of CPAC organizers to promote the Trump administration’s priorities, according to a person involved with planning the event. Trump and his top officials have made challenging China’s rise — through issues like trade, military power and cybersecurity — one of their top priorities.

“They are doing this to help President Trump,” said the person. “They believe China is a big part of Trump’s presidency and a source of his foreign policy victories.”

The ACU’s executive director, Dan Schneider, said the agenda was the result of months of meetings with conservative groups. Schneider also cited his own experience living in China three decades ago, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. “I have seen firsthand what the Chinese Communist Party is capable of,” he said. “China is the single greatest threat to peace on Earth.”

Trump, who has taken a more confrontational approach to China than his recent predecessors, has presided over a hardening of conservative opinion toward the country. Before Trump’s rise and his pursuit of aggressive trade measures against China and other nations, free-market, pro-trade ideas dominated the conservative movement.

“For a long time there was a lot of money flowing into the free market right to defend trade at all costs, and I think a lot of conservatives, including hawks, may have looked the other way for some time as a result,” said Christopher Hull, a conservative foreign policy hand who until recently served as executive vice president at the Center for Security Policy, a think tank founded by CPAC regular Frank Gaffney.

“You’re now hearing views that would have been unthinkable even just a couple years ago,” said Gordon Chang, a China-watcher who is participating in all three CPAC panels. Chang, a hard-liner who calls for disengagement from China, said his once-fringe view is being taken more seriously across the political spectrum. “I used to say these things and people would look at me and say, ‘Are you out of your mind?’” No longer, he said.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, a China hawk who praised Chang as a “huge piece of manpower,” compared this year’s focus on China to the conference’s focus on the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s, when former President Ronald Reagan led the movement. “This is like what CPAC would be at the height of the Cold War,” he said.

“CPAC is sending a powerful message to the conservative movement by the depth and breadth of the panels.”

Before Trump’s presidency, CPAC speakers favored other targets. “Putin’s Russia: A New Cold War?” asked a panel in 2015. U.S.-Russia relations have only gotten worse since then. But that question won’t be on the table at this year’s event.

Similarly, Islamic terrorism was a major theme at recent CPAC gatherings. Four years ago, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, then preparing to seek the Republican presidential nomination, famously boasted at CPAC that his experience in political battles with labor unions had prepared him to take on the Islamic State. “I want a commander in chief who will do everything in their power to make sure the threat from Islamic terrorists will not show up on our soil,” he said. “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.” But in December, Trump declared victory over ISIS — prematurely, critics say — and the topic has receded from this year’s conference agenda.

For conference organizers, the task of projecting the administration’s view on China is complicated by the lack of consensus among his advisers about how to handle the rising Asian power.

For example, conference organizers considered a speaking role for Trump’s ambassador to China, former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who traveled to Washington last week to participate in ongoing trade talks with representatives from Beijing. But the organizers deemed him too soft on China and did not invite him, according to the person involved in the event’s planning.

Asked whether Branstad had been ruled out as a speaker, Schneider said only: “We looked for the best speakers who could highlight the threat of China.” He also pointed to a Friday morning talk featuring Trump’s ambassador to Japan, Bill Hagerty.

“He’s very strong on the threat of China to all of Asia,” Schneider said.

Mike Pillsbury, a veteran China policy hand and adviser to Trump, will participate with Chang in a panel titled “The Gathering Storm,” a reference to Churchill’s book about the rise of Nazi Germany, on Saturday, when Trump is also scheduled to address the conference in separate remarks.

Though both Pillsbury and Chang fall on the hawkish side, Pillsbury advocates for engagement with China, a position far more conciliatory than Chang’s. Pillsbury said he expects the conference to be marked by lively debate on China, as the conservative movement attempts to formulate a new consensus.

“What the conservative view on China should be,” he said, “Has not been defined yet.”

As the press was about to be ushered out so President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could meet on Thursday in Vietnam, a reporter shouted a question: “Chairman Kim, are you confident?”

In a stunning — and possibly unprecedented — move, Kim answered.

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He paused, looked at his translator, then offered some brief thoughts.

“It’s too early to tell, but I wouldn’t say I’m pessimistic,” he said through the translator. “From what I feel right now, I do have a feeling that good results will come out.”

Perhaps emboldened, reporters came prepared with more questions for Kim when they were let back into the room following several hours of meetings between Trump, Kim and various officials from both sides.

One reporter asked if Kim was willing to denuclearize.

“If I’m not willing to do that I wouldn’t be here right now,” Kim said, prompting Trump to grin and praise his answer.

“That might be the best answer you’ve ever heard,” the president quipped.

Asked if he would agree to take concrete steps to achieve that goal, Kim smiled as he gestured to the table everyone was sitting at. “That is what we are discussing right now.”

Later, Trump even encouraged Kim to answer a question about whether he was amenable to the U.S. opening a liaison office in North Korea, something that could appear in a joint agreement at the end of the summit.

“That is something that is welcomeable,” Kim said, with Trump agreeing that the idea was a “great thing.”

Trump did occasionally shield Kim, telling reporters, “don’t raise your voice please, this isn’t like dealing with Trump.” He also jumped in on a pointed question about whether the two sides were discussing human rights, given the North Korean government’s repressive history.

“We’re discussing everything,” Trump interjected.

Still, it was perhaps the first time Kim had ever answered questions from foreign journalists. And it was a particularly striking moment as it came amid ongoing squabbles over press access at the summit.

The issue became point of contention early during Trump’s second meeting with Kim when reporters were mostly barred from a dinner meeting between the two leaders Wednesday night. The restriction came after reporters shouted questions at the president about the salacious congressional testimony of his former lawyer, Michael Cohen.

The White House said “the sensitive nature of the meetings” necessitated the decision.

A day earlier, the White House press corps had been booted from its White House-sanctioned filing center, which happened to be located in the same hotel Kim is staying in for the duration of his visit.

North Korea tightly controls its media outlets, only allowing fawning coverage of Kim, and the leader has previously ignored questions from the few foreign reporters he does encounter.

Instead, Kim is more accustomed to speaking with Americans like former NBA star Dennis Rodman.

The rebounding specialist — who also claims a friendship with Trump and appeared on “The Celebrity Apprentice” — has made multiple visits to North Korea to meet with Kim in recent years. Trump even named him an “Ambassador of Goodwill to North Korea.”

Rodman on Wednesday wished the two leaders luck in an Instagram post before their meeting began.

“My continued friendship with Chairman Kim remains strong — a friendship I encourage you to continue to use for our nation’s benefit,” Rodman wrote. “While I will not be able to attend the Hanoi events, I plan on following up with you, your team, and my friend, Chairman Kim.”

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— Hacker Fantastic (@hackerfantastic) February 27, 2019

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— Hacker Fantastic (@hackerfantastic) February 27, 2019