WASHINGTON — President Trump contradicted his national security adviser on Thursday over North Korea policy after an angry rebuke from Pyongyang over John Bolton’s comments. Bolton had recently suggested that Libya could serve as a model for persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.

But Trump veered away from that idea, saying Thursday that ‘‘the Libya model isn’t the model that we have at all when we’re thinking of North Korea.’’

He cautioned, however, that the fate suffered by Libya shows ‘‘what will take place if we don’t make a deal.’’ Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed by rebel forces in 2011 during the Arab Spring uprising, years after his government voluntarily decided to give up its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

While Trump may have been seeking to soothe tensions ahead of a June summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, even offering reassurances to Kim that regime change is not on the agenda, it is not clear that his Libya comments would have the intended effect.

Bolton himself hadn’t implied, publicly at least, that the ‘‘Libya model’’ would include regime change in North Korea. Instead, he emphasized in an interview with CBS the need to build trust and verify any denuclearization efforts.

‘‘What we want to see from them is evidence that it’s real and not just rhetoric,’’ Bolton told the network in April. ‘‘One thing that Libya did that led us to overcome our skepticism was that they allowed American and British observers into all their nuclear-related sites. So it wasn’t a question of relying on international mechanisms. We saw them in ways we had never seen before.’’

What Bolton didn’t mention was that North Korea already had rejected a verification scheme based on the Libya model 10 years ago. In 2008, the United States proposed a verification process to Pyongyang that was based on inspection processes previously used in Libya. North Korea objected to two key elements of that plan: the taking of samples and visits to undeclared facilities.

Prior resistance to that plan and North Korea’s longstanding animosity toward Bolton may explain Pyongyang’s anger and subsequent threat to cancel the upcoming summit.

‘‘High-ranking officials of the White House and the Department of State including Bolton, White House national security adviser, are letting loose the assertions of a so-called Libya model of nuclear abandonment,’’ North Korea said Wednesday. The world, North Korea went on to say, ‘‘knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which met miserable fates.’’ (Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was hanged in 2006.)

Regardless of whether Libya can be a model for North Korea, how did the United States persuade Gadhafi in 2003 and 2004 to give up his early-stage nuclear weapons program? And why was the Libyan regime toppled? The answers, it appears, depend on whom you’re asking.

The George W. Bush administration framed Libya’s move as resulting from the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion and intelligence operations that cut off delivery routes for Libya’s nuclear weapons program. In an interview with CNN, Gadhafi indicated the toppling of the Hussein regime in Iraq may have affected his decision.

‘‘In word and action, we have clarified the choices left to potential adversaries,’’ then-President George W. Bush said when he announced the program’s dismantlement, indirectly referring to the Iraq War.

But analysts criticized the Iraq-Libya link at the time and suggested Bush may have been trying to use success in Libya to defend his Iraq legacy. Gadhafi’s concessions, wrote Brookings analyst Martin Indyk in 2004, were linked mostly to Libya’s economic crisis after years of sanctions and mismanagement. ‘‘The only way out was to seek rapprochement with Washington,’’ Indyk wrote. And while North Korea has long been able to rely on China, the United States was the dominant power in the Middle East in the early 2000s.

Gadhafi’s search for allies and rehabilitation ultimately led him to strike a more conciliatory tone, Indyk said. ‘‘Fed up with pan-Arabism, he turned to Africa, only to find little support from old allies there. Removing the sanctions and their accompanying stigma became his priority,’’ the analyst wrote.

Multiple reports suggest Gadhafi’s willingness to negotiate an end to his nuclear weapons program were initially rebuffed. When offering to give up the program in exchange for sanctions relief wasn’t sufficient, he looked for ways to settle his dispute with Britain over the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 — a US condition for further talks. Overall, 270 people died in the attack, for which Gadhafi claimed responsibility in 2003, though he maintained that he had not ordered the bombing. Libya agreed to pay at least $5 million to the families of each of the 270 victims.