HANOI — When he vowed to “solve” the North Korea problem just before his inauguration two years ago, President Trump made clear he meant eliminating its nuclear arsenal.

But on the eve of a second meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, the president sounds prepared to accept much less, at least for the foreseeable future.

“I don’t want to rush anybody,” he said this past weekend. “As long as there is no testing, we’re happy,” he added, pointing to the North’s suspension of nuclear and missile tests.

Even to some of Mr. Trump’s national security aides, that sounded like a significant retreat at a critical moment.

As he landed in Hanoi late Tuesday, Mr. Trump appeared determined to change America’s relationship with a nation that has been a bitter and brutal adversary for nearly 70 years — and willing to shift his administration’s goals to do so, from immediate dismantlement of the North’s arsenal to limits on its size and reach.

It is unclear whether the two men will emerge in the coming days with any of the breakthroughs that appear in the mix for discussion: a freeze on nuclear production, a peace agreement aimed at formally ending the Korean War, or a schedule for dismantling the North’s arsenal.

But they chose Vietnam for obvious reasons: It is a bustling symbol of how a country that once fought the United States can become a fast-growing economy even while retaining a heavy dose of authoritarian rule.

And for both leaders, it is a moment of critical choices. Mr. Kim needs to make good on promises to nurture the North Korean economy and maintain the military might to ensure his country’s survival, while Mr. Trump faces the biggest opportunity of his presidency yet for a diplomatic breakthrough — and the stark risks of underdelivering on a signature issue after threatening “fire and fury” only months ago.

Mr. Trump has an even higher hurdle to clear: his dismissal of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, a “terrible” and naïve deal, in his telling, that was guaranteed to eventually pave the way for the country to obtain a nuclear weapon.

[Here’s what’s at stake in the meeting.]

What the world may learn when he meets with Mr. Kim for the second time in a year is whether he is willing to accept a weaker deal with North Korea — and whether he can sell it.

North Korea presents a far more difficult case than Iran. It already has an arsenal of as many as 30 nuclear weapons, as well as missiles that can reach the United States. Its devotion to that national project is so intense that Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, angered him by saying last month that the North was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities” because they are “critical to regime survival.”

If Mr. Coats is right, the president’s warm embrace of Mr. Kim could encourage other countries to make a sprint for the nuclear finish line, convinced that in the end, the United States will learn to live with yet another nuclear power.

Mr. Trump hopes to be remembered in history for bringing peace to the Korean Peninsula. But he also risks becoming the president on whose watch North Korea demonstrated an ability both to hit the United States with a missile and to detonate a hydrogen bomb — and who then gave it such a good deal that others decided to build nuclear arsenals, too.

Even some hard-liners in Washington, though, see the potential of Mr. Trump’s gamble. “The stars have kind of lined up,’’ said Andy Kim, a former head of the C.I.A.’s Korea mission center, and the man who last year ran messages between the two leaders.

Speaking at Stanford University last week, he recalled that the young North Korean leader told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Pyongyang that he was thinking of the future: “I’m a father and a husband. And I have children. And I don’t want my children to carry the nuclear weapon on their back their whole life.”

Mr. Pompeo left the meeting hopeful, but wary.

The secretary of state bristled last week when asked to reflect on how the lessons of the Iran deal applied to North Korea. Sounding exasperated, he said they were “very different situations” and insisted that “the full and final denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a verifiable manner” remained the ultimate goal.

But whatever deal emerges in Vietnam will be compared to the one that President Barack Obama struck more than three years ago with Iran, and that Mr. Trump has now abandoned. In return for a lifting of sanctions, Tehran agreed to ship 97 percent of its atomic fuel out of the country and to halt virtually all new production until 2030.

“The irony is that the best possible outcome for North Korea would look something like the Iran deal,” said Robert Litwak, who has compared the negotiations in his work at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington.

There are a few other comparisons, from Ukraine to Kazakhstan to South Africa to Libya, that will also hang over the meetings. All gave up nuclear arsenals or the equipment to build one. But as Mr. Trump has discovered, there has never been a problem quite as complex as North Korea.

Perhaps for that reason, Mr. Trump has moved away from using denuclearization as a measure of success, instead citing the dialogue itself — and the warmth between him and a dictator half his age — as the metric of progress. With an eye on the Nobel Peace Prize, he may not get any closer than this to an agreement as momentous as those that Ronald Reagan reached with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union.

Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Mr. Pompeo drew a contrast with the Obama strategy for dealing with Pyongyang, which he said came down to test, pray and cower.

“Let them test missiles, let them test nuclear weapons, pray they stop, and cower when the North Koreans made a threat,” he said.

Mr. Trump and his national security team often cite the North’s moratorium on missile and nuclear testing, now stretching into its 16th month, as their biggest achievement so far.

The testing moratorium is in fact significant. As Siegfried Hecker, a former head of Los Alamos National Laboratory, noted recently, “If you can’t test, you can’t make progress.”

And North Korea has not yet demonstrated it can design an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead that could survive the heat and stresses of returning through the atmosphere to reach its target.

But a halt to testing is not denuclearization. To make progress toward that goal, Mr. Trump needs to persuade Mr. Kim to begin dismantling the country’s main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, including a uranium enrichment facility shown to Mr. Hecker eight years ago — and to do so under the watch of outside inspectors. North Korea is also widely believed to operate at least one clandestine uranium enrichment plant outside Yongbyon.

After Mr. Trump’s first summit meeting with Mr. Kim in Singapore, Mr. Pompeo insisted that North Korea begin the process by declaring all its nuclear weapons, production facilities and missiles. It refused, saying he was simply looking for a targeting list. Mr. Pompeo replied that he already had one.

The inventory has been a sticking point ever since. But last month, Mr. Pompeo’s special envoy, Stephen Biegun, said in a speech that the list could be turned over later in the process.

That raised hackles at the White House, where some of the staff working for John R. Bolton, the national security adviser and a hawk on North Korea, asked whether Mr. Biegun was giving up too much.

There are similar worries in South Korea, where people have mixed feelings about Mr. Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea.

They support it because they do not see a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula as long as the North remains armed with nuclear weapons, and Mr. Trump is the first American president willing to engage directly with any North Korean leader.

The cheering section for Mr. Trump is led by President Moon Jae-in, who has repeatedly vouched for Mr. Kim’s willingness to give up his nuclear arms in exchange for a better economic future for his country.

But polls show falling public confidence in South Korea that the North will actually surrender its weapons. And there is concern that Mr. Trump lacks the patience and attention needed for a long, complicated negotiation certain to include setbacks.

The bigger fear is that Mr. Trump might undermine the alliance by accepting half-steps by North Korea as a victory, and then walking away.

“It will be particularly bad for South Korea and President Moon if Trump declares peace and changes the status of the U.S. military presence in the South” before denuclearization, said Lee Byong-chul, a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul. “There will be a huge conservative backlash in South Korea.”

Older, conservative South Koreans have staged protests in downtown Seoul in recent weekends, warning that Mr. Kim’s goal is to break the South Korean-American military alliance and give Mr. Trump an excuse to make good on his repeated threats to pull American troops out of the South.

Some American officials are worried about the same thing.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim are widely expected to sign some form of “peace declaration” in Hanoi as a prelude to negotiating a formal peace treaty to replace the uneasy armistice signed at the end of the Korean War in 1953. Such a declaration would just recognize reality, but some analysts fear that withdrawing some troops could be a natural next step.

The United States and North Korea are also conducting negotiations over the possibility of opening liaison offices, a step toward formal diplomatic relations. But it is unclear what Mr. Trump will insist on from the North in return.

David E. Sanger reported from Hanoi, and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul, South Korea.

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