On Monday morning, the world woke up to President Trump’s all-caps tweet to the President of Iran, sent late the night before. “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE,” the President warned Hassan Rouhani. By Tuesday, it seemed that nuclear war was not, in fact, imminent. When I spoke on Wednesday with Mark Dubowitz, an expert on Iran who advises the Trump Administration, he had an entirely different theory.

The Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, had delivered a major speech on Sunday night, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, accusing the Islamic Republic’s leaders of corruption and encouraging protests in the country in advance of a series of punitive new measures the Administration plans to take against the regime. “But it wasn’t even one news cycle,” Dubowitz said, “before Trump had to send his all-caps tweet and stomp on Pompeo’s messaging.” Dubowitz, who attended the speech at the Reagan Library, has been consulting with the State Department on what he says are a range of new measures on Iran, including replacing the nuclear deal that Trump pulled out of in May over the objections of European allies and some key advisers, including the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis. The new policy was meant neither to suggest imminent war, as Trump’s tweet did, nor a new round of negotiations with the Iranians, as Trump offered in the course of walking back his inflammatory tweet.

In the space of two days, Trump had once again utterly confused the world as to his Administration’s Iran policy. And no one really knew why: Was it to distract from the continued political outcry over the summit in Helsinki with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin? Because he couldn’t stand Pompeo having a moment in the spotlight? Because he saw something on late-night TV that got him stewing over Iran? “Step away from what Trump is saying and look at what Pompeo and others are doing,” Dubowitz told me. “One can critique it, but there is actually a comprehensive and coherent strategy on Iran. The problem is, one cannot too long separate the strategy from what the President is going to say and do at any given moment.”

A few minutes after I spoke with Dubowitz, Pompeo took the microphone at an extraordinary hearing that Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said had been called because of “the serious doubts about this White House and its conduct of American foreign policy” among senators of both parties. For the next three hours, Corker and other senators questioned a testy and combative Pompeo about Trump’s recent summits with the leaders of North Korea and Russia, Trump’s vastly overstated claims about the accomplishments at those summits, and Trump’s lavish praise for the two autocrats at a time when he was severely criticizing America’s allies and his own intelligence agencies. (It should be noted that Sunday night’s threat to start a nuclear conflict with Iran didn’t even rate a mention.)

Pompeo’s mantra was that U.S. policy toward Russia has not changed, regardless of what the President has said or tweeted, or even what he might have agreed to in private with Putin. Senator after senator asked versions of the same question. Again and again, Pompeo deflected.

Did Trump discuss weakening or lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia during his two-hour one-on-one meeting in Helsinki? Were there secret “agreements” with Putin, as the Kremlin has since claimed? “There’s been no change to U.S. policy,” Pompeo said.

Did the President mean it when he called, just the other day, the investigation of Russian election interference a “hoax”? “There’s been no change to U.S. policy,” Pompeo said.

Why was Trump, as Corker put it in his opening statement, so “submissive and deferential” toward Putin? “U.S. policy hasn’t changed,” Pompeo said.

In the days immediately after the shocking press conference held by Trump and Putin in Helsinki, many were left wondering whether Trump had finally gone too far. Republicans were critical; members of his own Administration seemed reluctant to defend him, and uncertain even of what to say. The announcement by the White House of Trump’s audacious plan for a second summit with Putin, right here in Washington, stunned even his own director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats—a moment caught live on TV. Maybe this time would be different. And, indeed, Wednesday’s hearing was extraordinary even by the standards of the Trump era. I can’t recall a Secretary of State ever being subjected to such a contentious, skeptical grilling by a committee chairman from his own party. The Times called it “an elaborate cleanup effort by the United States’ chief diplomat for Mr. Trump’s performance in Helsinki.”

A week after that Helsinki performance, however, we now know the answer to whether the summit would provide the moment of oppositional clarity that so many other controversies had failed to deliver: the cleanup by Trump’s advisers is messy, but it appears to be working.

Just before Pompeo testified, the White House announced that the second Putin summit would not happen, at least not this year. New sanctions on Russia are in the works on Capitol Hill; an official National Security Council meeting has been called for Friday to show how seriously the President takes the threat of Russian intervention in this year’s midterm elections. Trump has not publicly accepted Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and Pompeo acted to make that much more difficult by announcing at the start of his testimony a formal new declaration of U.S. policy never to recognize Putin’s seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula, in 2014. (The declaration was approved by Pompeo weeks ago, a senior official told me, but was held up because of Helsinki, after which “the President got so beat up, it became a useful thing, and the political optics switched to make it desirable from the White House point of view.”) Action is being taken, while the outrage show is moving on to other, more salacious subjects, like the President’s alleged payments made to a Playboy model, details of which were seemingly discussed in an audio recording of Trump made public this week by the President’s estranged former lawyer Michael Cohen. The story of Pompeo’s extraordinary afternoon on Capitol Hill didn’t even make the Times’ front page. This time was not different after all.

In fact, it sounded very familiar. From the start of the Administration, Trump has shaken the world with his “wrecking ball” approach to foreign policy, as Corker once put it, only to have his advisers rush in to reassure the world that the President’s words, however inflammatory, don’t really mean that much. “The President communicates in the fashion he communicates. That doesn’t dictate our policy,” Rex Tillerson, Pompeo’s predecessor as Secretary of State, told reporters in February, amid an earlier round of controversy over the Administration’s approach to North Korea. “The President’s tweets don’t define the policy.” A month later, Tillerson was fired, after learning the news from an early-morning Presidential tweet that, if nothing else, defined his policy toward his Secretary of State.