Just after Tuesday’s summit between President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, many American pundits reacted with scorn. They argued that Trump had elevated and made concessions to a tyrant without getting anything concrete in return. In South Korea, people were more charitable, and emotional. On the radio in a suburb of Seoul, talk-show hosts spoke of a path to peace and the reassurance of ordinary diplomacy. The two-page, four-point agreement signed by Trump and Kim was welcomed as a departure from the war-mongering rhetoric of just a few months back.

There is hope today, among South Korea’s fifty-one million residents, in the strange chemistry of Trump, Kim, and the South Korean President, Moon Jae-in; there is a belief that a peace treaty to officially end the Korean War, and a stepwise plan for North Korea’s nuclear downsizing, if not total disarmament, could be imminent. Meanwhile, America’s foreign-policy establishment, conservatives touting human rights, and Democratic leaders have issued statements and tweets (“the summit—and particularly its immediate aftermath—was a farce,” James Acton, of the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Program, wrote) that sound more like those coming from conservative extremists in Korea and the ruling right wing in Japan. South Koreans don’t love Trump, but, in a place where the U.S. military led a war that killed millions and created a multigenerational, literal rift, American standing and protocol are not the priority. From the Korean point of view, U.S. politics as usual has done little good for the peninsula. George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” and his opportunistic obsession with North Korean human rights (while setting up the prison at Guantánamo) rolled back years of inter-Korean progress. President Obama, to the profound disappointment of many on the peninsula, did nothing to advance Korean peace.

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To be sure, there are many reasons to condemn Trump—just this week, he engaged in a reckless display of aggression against America’s G-7 allies. But Koreans see the Singapore summit not just as another sensational episode in the story of Donald Trump but as a step away from a sixty-eight-year-old unfinished war. In South Korea, in all but the most reactionary circles, there is a sense of ethnic solidarity with the North and some longing for unity. Support for President Moon, who is seen widely as the catalyst for this sudden thaw of relations between North Korea and the world, remains high. (Local elections, though overshadowed by the summit, take place on Wednesday in South Korea. Support for Moon’s party, generally, has also remained high, and voters will have a chance to express their confidence at the ballot box.) I’ve yet to meet a single Korean who isn’t willing to express optimism, in some form, about the prospects for peace and reunification. In Seoul’s warrens of family-run shops and restaurants, television news blares constantly over the counter. (North Koreans, meanwhile, are getting snippets of Singapore via the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper and smuggled foreign media.) This morning, a hundred and thirty thousand people tuned in to the live feed of JTBC, a respected South Korean news channel, to watch Trump and Kim shake hands. Some of my South Korean friends have confessed their fantasies of driving up through North Korea, into Russia, and across Europe. Nearly everyone uses the same common phrase to express a basic optimism: “잘될 것 같아요”—“I think it’ll work out.”

In the lead-up to the summit, while Western commentators invoked the nuclear trajectories of countries such as Pakistan, Iran, and Libya, Korean analysts found other historical situations more instructive and worthy of discussion. Kim Yong-hyun, an expert on North Korea who teaches at Dongguk University, compared the U.S.-North Korea meeting to the Malta Summit of 1989, when George H. W. Bush met Mikhail Gorbachev and predicted that we might see “the end of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula.” In the Naeil newspaper, Jo Se-young, of Dongseo University, endorsed the meeting between Washington and Pyongyang, citing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s observation that, in hindsight, simple dialogue with the North Vietnamese might have truncated the war in Vietnam.

The dominant view in Seoul is that the Singapore summit would not have taken place had Hillary Clinton been the President of the United States. Trump’s approval ratings in South Korea are around thirty per cent—the same as Kim’s—and South Koreans know that Trump’s policies have resulted in cruelties and chaos elsewhere in the world. But here they are willing to take the unexpected good brought about by his Presidency. Lee Soo-jung, an anthropologist at Duksung Women’s University, acknowledged the painful “historical irony” of benefitting from Trump. In a fairer world, she tells me, “The citizens of the world would be able to vote for the U.S. President.”

The agreement coming out of the Singapore summit “does open the door for more meetings ahead,” Grace Liu, an East Asia researcher at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told me. “But it’d be wrong to claim a victory for the disarmament community or any substantial action toward denuclearization.” To get close to something like the Agreed Framework, the weapons freeze negotiated between North Korea and the U.S. in 1994, the two countries would need “to reach out to technical experts in the field and work with organizations like the International Atomic Energy Agency to set up a technical agreement that can be followed through with,” Liu added. Something, in other words, similar to the deal that President Obama negotiated with Iran—which Trump recently scrapped.

Some of Trump’s assertions at his post-summit press conference—his desire to bring home some thirty-thousand American troops stationed in South Korea; his vow to stop the “war games” (the joint military exercises) with South Korea; and his assertion that South Korea, Japan, and China should foot the bill for North Korea’s economic development—left Korean analysts confused and stunned.

But President Moon, surely knowing his man in Washington by now, did not respond to Trump’s unscripted remarks. After the summit, Moon issued a short statement congratulating the U.S. and North Korea on a “successful” and “historic” meeting, praising Trump for his initiative and promising to work toward inter-Korean peace. South Koreans do not trust Kim or Trump, or believe in the possibility of a quick reunification. They are simply aware of the toll that seventy years of national division have taken, and are eager for an alternative future.