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If diplomatic talks between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un don't produce any kind of agreement on the rogue state's nuclear weapons program, that could bolster Washington's appetite for military action, strategists warned.

"If the North Korea-U.S. summit fails to conclude in an agreement, war risks will increase, exceeding previous levels, because of another failure of diplomacy," Alison Evans, deputy head of Asia Pacific country risk at IHS Markit, said in a note.

Bilateral talks are expected to be complicated by the fact that the White House and Pyongyang hold different understandings of what it means to denuclearize.

Should the summit fail, "it may actually bring us closer to war as we will have exhausted all diplomatic options," Victor Cha, a Georgetown University professor and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said at a recent U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing.

There may be a broad desire for diplomacy with Kim, but "the United States is talking more about military strikes than it ever has done before," according to Cha. The Trump administration "has spent most of its time generating papers about pressure and military options" rather than considering what price it is willing to pay for Kim to relinquish weapons, he said.