A couple of days after Donald Trump told the world that U.S. military strikes had “completely and totally obliterated” and “completely destroyed” Iranian nuclear sites, inconvenient information emerged: As NBC News confirmed, a preliminary intelligence assessment from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that the airstrikes “were not as effective” as Trump claimed, and the mission set Iran’s nuclear program “back by only three to six months.”

The president’s public meltdown soon followed, with the Republican lashing out wildly at news organizations for presenting Americans with accurate information, while insisting that his apparent falsehoods were correct, evidence be damned.

It was against this backdrop that CIA Director John Ratcliffe — a highly partisan former Republican congressman whose controversial record includes declassifying intelligence in order to score political points — made an announcement on Wednesday afternoon: It now appears the Trump-approved strikes “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program and left several key sites “destroyed.”

Obviously, it matters whether the mission fell short of its objectives, just as it matters that the American president is waging an unhinged campaign against his country’s free press. For that matter, it’s equally important to acknowledge how dangerous it is when a White House misleads the public while rejecting intelligence that fails to tell the president what he wants to hear.

But there’s another element to this that came to the fore unexpectedly during this week’s NATO summit. NBC News reported:

Trump said that the U.S. would ‘talk with’ Iran next week, adding, ‘we may sign an agreement, I don’t know.’ He said that he didn’t think an agreement to curtail its nuclear program was ‘that necessary.’ … ‘I don’t care if I have an agreement or not,” he said. ‘The only thing we’d be asking for is what we were asking for before, about ‘we want no nuclear,’ but we destroyed the nuclear. In other words, it’s destroyed.’

On Monday, I wrote a post along these lines, warning of this possibility: If Trump genuinely believes his own talking points; he’s convinced himself that Iran’s nuclear program has been obliterated; and he’s now working from the assumption that it’ll be, in his words, “decades” before Tehran’s nuclear capabilities return to where they were last week, then his incentives for holding diplomatic talks with Iranian officials have effectively disappeared.

He said as much in no uncertain terms: “I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”

In case this isn’t obvious, after Trump foolishly abandoned the Obama-era international nuclear agreement with Iran, the Republican launched a “maximum pressure” campaign intended to force Iran back to the negotiating table in order to forge a new, long-term solution to the underlying issue. This has been his position for seven years.

Now, however, because Trump has embraced assumptions apparently unsupported by evidence, he suddenly feels indifferent about the endeavor.

Whether the president understands this or not, such an approach is absurd. As The Washington Post’s Max Boot explained in his latest column, “Trump promised in 2018 to negotiate a far tougher accord with Iran. He never has, and he now claims it is no longer necessary. He is wrong. At the end of the day … there is simply no substitute for diplomacy in dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

The longer the president denies this simple truth, because he’s overly wedded to assumptions untied to intelligence, the worse off everyone will be.