Calling Kim’s Bluff

After North Korea this week abruptly threatened to pull out of next month’s Singapore summit on Pyongyang’s nuclear program, President Trump was uncharacteristically cautious and noncommittal — which is just the right way to play it.

“We’ll see,” said Trump on Wednesday in response to the rant from North Korea’s vice foreign minister denouncing any effort to “drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment.”

No such “unilateral” deal was ever going to happen, of course: Kim Jong-un will get something (sanctions relief, economic aid) in return for what National Security Adviser John Bolton insists must be “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.”

The bluster came as Pyongyang canceled talks with Seoul, supposedly over longplanned US-South Korean military exercises.

If it’s all a bluff — a test of whether Team Trump, dazzled by talk of a Nobel Peace Prize, can be rolled into up-front concessions — and the prez must call it.

If it’s not a bluff, better to know now, so Washington can go back to finding new ways to create pain for the Kim regime.

As it is, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo already has suggested that Trump might accept less than Bolton’s strict conditions, settling for a cap that removes any direct nuclear threat to the United States.

That’s OK as part of a good cop-bad cop act to keep Kim guessing, but this is no time to make unilateral concessions — not with North Korea’s record of breaking its word.

Fact is, Kim needs a deal more than Trump does; Pyongyang desperately wants sanctions relief.

And the White House gets it. “The president is ready if the meeting takes place,” says spokeswoman Sarah Sanders. “If it doesn’t, we’ll continue the maximum pressure campaign that’s been ongoing.”