“THINK of it”, the president enjoined reporters, “from a real-estate perspective.” When presented with images of North Korean artillery firing fusillade after fusillade into the sea, he said at his somewhat surreal post-summit press conference, he had seen a place that would “make a great condo. You…could have the best hotels in the world right there.” Trump Towers, Wonsan—a North Korean city that passes as a resort—suddenly seemed a tantalising possibility, perhaps with the North Korean Open being played on an adjacent links. As his supporters have noted, President Donald Trump brings a unique viewpoint to foreign policy.

It was Mr Trump’s background as a reality TV performer, though, rather than his property-development chops, that set the tone for his summit meeting with Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, in Singapore on June 12th. With 2,500 reporters attending, the summit was quite the TV spectacular. It even had a tearful CNN appearance by one of Mr Trump’s “Apprentice” participants, Dennis Rodman, a former basketball player who counts himself a friend to both leaders. There was a bizarre “trailer” showing the sunlit uplands of North Korea’s peaceful future as a coming attraction. At one point Mr Kim said to Mr Trump that it would seem to many like something out of “a fantasy”.

Not unaccustomed to living in a fantasy, Mr Kim took to this limelight in a very effective way. He made use of his time on the stage with both domestic North Korean and international audiences very much in mind. Mr Kim runs a mafia state with the most brutal secret policemen and the ugliest human-rights record on Earth. An estimated 120,000 North Koreans, in some cases whole families, rot in labour camps. Countless children are malnourished and mentally stunted. Since he came to power in 2011, Mr Kim has cracked down savagely on those trying to escape to China. He has executed an uncle and assassinated a half-brother (in whose favoured Singapore hotel, the St Regis, Mr Kim stayed the night before the summit).

When “poison pen” is not a metaphor

Mr Kim ought to be at The Hague. Yet in Singapore, the dictator, who also has ten UN Security Council resolutions arrayed against him, was the toast of the town as he waved at the crowds down by the Marina Bay casino and posed for a selfie with the Singaporean foreign minister. By coming across as warm, jovial and eminently reasonable, the capo has morphed into something respectable, even statesmanlike. There is talk of him starring at the UN General Assembly in New York in the autumn and Mr Trump says he will be welcome in the White House.

Chunks of all this, carefully edited, were beamed back to North Korea as evidence of the leader’s global stature; the first picture state media had ever shown of Mr Trump was of him shaking hands with Mr Kim, his partner in peace. Only occasionally was it possible to glimpse Mr Kim’s mafia-state paranoia in Singapore, as when a gloved aide inspected and wiped the pen with which he was to sign the joint document with Mr Trump.

The document itself was striking—and, considering the flurry of working-level talks led by experienced nuclear negotiators in the run-up to the summit, disappointing—in its lack both of detail and of North Korean concessions. The two sides committed themselves “to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula”—not, as South Korea would have liked, to a peace treaty. Mr Trump declared that he would provide “security guarantees” to North Korea, but did not say what they would be. In return Mr Kim gave his “firm and unwavering commitment” to complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, but with no timetable, arrangements for verification or definitions of either “denuclearisation”—a term that in North Korea is typically taken to include the removal of all American forces from South Korea—or “complete”—which, when it comes to North Korean ideas about denuclearisation, can mean global.

As Victor Cha, who helped to run Asia policy for George W. Bush, noted, the agreement is less specific than previous North Korean pledges to curb its weapons programme, such as the one he worked on in 2005. Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor of the Asahi Shimbun in Japan, and a leading voice on Korea policy, was more directly critical: “If Hillary Clinton were president of the United States and had come up with yesterday’s agreement, Donald Trump would have rightly attacked her for a ‘fake’ denuclearisation...The word ‘denuclearisation’, [as used in the agreed text] is so elusive...it does not mean anything.”

A more charitable reading would see the agreement as a broad outline for further lower-level meetings to flesh out “at the earliest possible date”; Mr Trump has charged his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, with the task. Alternatively, it could be seen as the minimal possible substance required for the surrounding spectacle and its self-serving claims of a historic peace deal to be sustained by both parties. It may in time deliver tangible results. But there is no evidence that Mr Kim sees denuclearisation as meaning that he should dismantle the nuclear arsenal he, his father and his grandfather put so much effort into creating and the industrial complex which supports it. In practice he seems to be offering no testing for the time being and some access to sites the programme might be abandoning anyway. As Mr Trump has said that he wants the nuclear weapons gone, and that the Singapore agreement will make that happen, he will either have to show progress towards that end, blithely lie about the end having already been achieved despite evidence to the contrary, or change his mind and get tough—which would presumably mean bellicose—again.

A star is born

For the moment, though, tough is a thing of the past. At the post-summit press conference Mr Trump astonished many viewers by saying that the military exercises America regularly runs with South Korea were “very provocative”—a term favoured by China and North Korea—and “inappropriate” while negotiations were in progress: “We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money.”

That was a big unilateral concession. It alarmed South Korea and Japan, neither of which was warned of the move in advance; even some Republican politicians, including Ed Royce, chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, betrayed a certain unease. The American army command in the South declared that it would continue as before until otherwise instructed. The exercises have real practical value in training South Korea’s partly conscript army. They are also a potent symbol of America’s commitment to the security of its allies. “Without those comments, he could have sold the summit as a political success,” says Janka Oertel, an expert in East Asian security at the German Marshall Fund. “But alienating his allies in that way could do serious harm. It is also a massive gift to China.”

With enemies like this

Indeed, China lost no time in pointing out that it was the first to propose a “freeze for freeze” deal—no military exercises, no nuclear tests. Previous American administrations refused this gambit because it equated legal and legitimate operations by allies with an illicit weapons programme condemned by the UN. They were also well aware that Beijing was self-interestedly seeking to see a big chunk of America’s presence in Asia negotiated away. Now an American president who sees alliances as a costly burden, rather than as a source of strength, has given it what it wanted, at least for a while. The outcome of the summit, said Geng Shuang, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, “is what China has been looking forward to and striving for all along.”

China’s satisfaction means that, as well as becoming a statesman and seeing fewer military exercises on his doorstep, Mr Kim may also find the sanctions against his regime eased. Mr Trump, in his press conference, promised that the UN-mandated sanctions regime against North Korea would remain in place until it took material steps towards dismantling its nukes. Mr Geng, though, argued that UN rules allow sanctions to be loosened to “support” denuclearisation. And reports from the Chinese-North Korean border suggest that, whatever the official sanction regime, trade is already reviving—something Mr Trump acknowledged when he thanked “a very special person, President Xi of China, who has really closed up that border, maybe a little bit less so over the last couple of months, but that’s OK.” Absent massive provocation it is hard to imagine how America could reimpose a “maximum pressure” sanctions regime even if it wanted to—which Mr Trump does not.

South Korea, for its part, may devise workarounds that allow a degree of economic co-operation before any sanctions are lifted. Earlier this month the two countries reopened the liaison office in the Kaesong industrial complex, the site of their deepest economic co-operation. Straight after the summit, the South approved student exchanges between Seoul National University and Kim Il Sung University, the North’s flagship institution.

As that move shows, the South Korean response has been positive. The office of Moon Jae-in, the president, hailed the summit as a “historic event that has helped break down the last remaining cold war legacy on Earth” and provided copious pictures of Mr Moon beaming down at television footage that showed Mr Kim and Mr Trump shaking hands. The fact that the summit took place at all is a win for Mr Moon, who has made the peace process on the Korean peninsula a central issue of his presidency. That does not mean that the cancellation of the military exercises was met with equanimity. A later statement from the president’s office said that Mr Trump’s press-conference remarks required a “clearer understanding”. When Mr Pompeo met with South Korean and Japanese officials in Seoul on June 14th to share details of the summit and discuss the next steps, he had some explaining to do.

The conservative opposition is more strident on the subject: Hong Jun-pyo, the chairman of Liberty Korea, the main opposition party, said that “South Korea’s security is now just hanging off a cliff.” But the president and the peace process are both popular. Having lived within range of the North’s artillery for decades, South Koreans are less concerned by the presence or absence of nuclear weapons than by the threat of an actual war, which seemed more possible late last year than it had for some time. Mr Moon’s Minjoo Party had huge success in local elections on June 13th; Mr Hong’s days may be numbered.

Mr Kim will welcome sanctions relief and money from South Korea. He tolerates significantly more commerce than his predecessors did. Today’s sanctions, applied at full force, threaten the modest boom he has presided over since taking power, and thus risk angering the elites who have benefited from it. The promise of more development now that the push for nuclear weapons has paid off is an attractive narrative for the North Korean public. On the day of the summit Rodong Sinmun, North Korea’s official party newspaper, splashed on a night-time jaunt Mr Kim took around Singapore, admiring the glittering skyline and saying he had learnt much about economic development in the city state.

The long con

This does not mean that Mr Kim is interested in the sort of full-on market economy which serious foreign investment would require. Nor are North Korea’s proto-capitalist elites. A proper opening of the country would surely lead to their being outcompeted by South Korean or Chinese companies. But a glitzier tyranny has its appeals, especially if a little economic growth improves morale.

For this to work, Mr Kim needs time, and that is what he can be expected to play for in the coming negotiations. Mr Pompeo has talked of “major disarmament” within two-and-a-half years. A former CIA director, he has no illusions about North Korean tactics. But there would be limits to how quickly things could go even if North Korea acted in good faith. Siegfried Hecker, who used to run America’s bomb-design lab at Los Alamos, and colleagues at Stanford University estimated last month that, even if the North were serious about it, the process could take more than a decade.

With missiles and a stockpile of bombs, as well as a uranium-enrichment programme, to deal with, the effort would have to be far more painstaking than the process Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, put in place for the Iran deal. It would require a stringent, and thus hard-to-negotiate, verification regime to be in operation from the beginning; ad hoc inspections of particular sites are not remotely enough. It would need the help of the International Atomic Energy Agency and also, possibly, the European powers that Mr Trump alienated by tearing up that hard-won Iran deal.

Bye bye bombers

Time plays to Mr Kim’s advantage. He intends to remain in power for decades. Mr Trump might be voted out in 2020. Mr Trump may return to Washington, DC, and reconsider his approach to Mr Kim; some in the administration seem to be distancing themselves from his announcement about “war games”. But Mr Kim is well-placed to string America along and play for time, offering concessions slowly, insincerely, or both.

That said, he has lost one of his old cards. He cannot play the world statesman and still rely on being able to wrong-foot adversaries with all-out weirdness; normalisation has some costs. But America has lost a card, too. If it finds it wants to reinforce sanctions, it will be hard to get Chinese support back. “If North Korea does not make another nuclear test or launch missiles again, I don’t think China will impose new sanctions,” says Li Nan, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a think-tank.

Back in Washington, the summit scrambled the usual dividing lines between military hawks and the foreign-policy establishment. Striving to offer credit where some is due, veteran diplomats praised Mr Trump for abandoning his “fire and fury” threats. One was Mr Cha, who might well have been Mr Trump’s ambassador to South Korea had he not made clear his horror at talk of pre-emptive military strikes on North Korea. “If the bar for success in this summit is war or peace,” he said, “it’s a pretty low bar. We got peace. So in that sense, we’re certainly in a better place than we were six months ago when there was a lot of talk about preventive military attacks and armed conflict.”

Meanwhile, some of the hardest-line, brook-no-compromise members of the Republican Party discovered a new fondness for foreign-policy realism—at least when it is practised by a president their voters back home adore. In 2015 Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, organised a letter from 47 senators to the leaders of Iran saying that if the Iran deal was not backed by Congress it could be overturned once a new president took office. On June 12th a newly pragmatic Mr Cotton explained to Hugh Hewitt, a radio host, that ostracism remains his favoured approach to “two-bit rogue regimes [that] don’t have nuclear weapons, yet”. But now that North Korea can deliver nuclear warheads all the way to America, sitting down with its dictator is “not a pretty sight” but is a “necessary” part of Mr Trump’s job, the senator averred.

If Mr Trump stands firm on the cancellation of the joint exercises, though, opposition to a move that so clearly signals an American disentanglement from security in the region—justified by Mr Trump, as is so often the case, on the basis of excessive costs which allies ripping off America were unwilling to shoulder—will mount in Washington, and in Japan, too. The Japanese government’s immediate response to the Singapore summit was a certain relief; it had not been the disaster it might have been. The Japanese view is that it is too early to assess how the process of denuclearisation was advanced by the summit. And it takes comfort from the fact that, when it comes to Mr Trump’s scorn for American alliances in Asia, it is in a different position from South Korea. Japan is home to the American navy’s Seventh Fleet, to air-force units and to US Marines—all expeditionary forces based in Asia not just to defend Japan and Taiwan but also to project power and to act as a deterrent. Those are missions likely to be needed for years to come.

Mr Funabashi is much less sanguine: “So far as thinking in Japan goes, the biggest casualty of this summit is likely to be the credibility of the US as an ally...Trump now poses the biggest challenge to [prime minister Shinzo] Abe’s political survival.”

On this broader point, though, it is too soon for Japan to despair—or China to rejoice. Chinese military planners have long dreamed of pushing American forces as far from their shores as possible, ideally back to the “third island chain” (strategist speak for Hawaii). Now they face an American president who talks happily about pulling his troops out of at least part of Asia unbidden. But China has learned to watch what American presidents do, not what they say, says Mr Li. After all, Mr Trump campaigned on a promise to withdraw troops from bases all around the world. But after Pentagon bureaucrats and generals worked on him, “they are still there.”

They may be in place for some time to come. So may Mr Kim. As for Trump Towers, Wonsan, the world will have to wait and see.