Some are interpreting the phone call as a disaster. “With one phone call, Donald Trump might have upturned America’s relationship with both Pakistan and India,” Jeet Heer wrote at the New Republic. But you don’t need to reach for the most dramatic potential consequences to appreciate the significance of the exchange between Trump and Sharif.

Reports of the call haven’t yet remade U.S. alliances in South Asia, but they did generate headlines like this on the front pages of Pakistani newspapers:

The reports also provoked a caustic response from the Indian government, which opposes U.S. mediation in its border dispute with Pakistan. “We look forward to the president-elect helping Pakistan address the most outstanding of its outstanding issues: terrorism,” a spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs said. And, ultimately, they forced Pakistani officials to backpedal after initially publicizing the conversation. “Our relationship with the United States is not about personalities—it is about institutions,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified. In other words, a brief, breezy conversation had real reverberations on the subcontinent.

One lesson of the phone call is that words matter, especially in international relations where information is patchy, things get lost in translation, rhetoric is often interpreted as policy, and a government’s credibility is only as good as its word. (Think of all the people in the United States puzzling over what policies Trump will pursue as president; now imagine trying to do that from Islamabad or New Delhi.) Barack Obama’s remark at a press conference about a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria very nearly compelled him, a year later, to launch air strikes against the Assad regime for violating that red line. George W. Bush’s decision to include Iran in an “axis of evil” in his State of the Union address torpedoed U.S.-Iranian cooperation on fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Words needn’t be spoken in public to have an impact on world affairs. In 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev met with John F. Kennedy in Vienna and verbally beat the new U.S. president to a pulp. A couple months later, Khrushchev approved the construction of the Berlin Wall—a move some scholars attribute in part to Khrushchev’s perception of Kennedy as weak and inexperienced.

For these reasons, as Daniel Drezner notes at the Washington Post, political scientists such as John Mearsheimer and Anne Sartori have found that governments don’t bluff or lie to one another as often as one might think (Mearsheimer contends that governments are more likely to deceive their own people). “States often are tempted to bluff, or dissemble, but a state that is caught bluffing acquires a reputation for doing so, and opponents are less likely to believe its future communications,” Sartori writes. “The prospect of acquiring a reputation for lying—and lessening the credibility of the state’s future diplomacy—keeps statesmen and diplomats honest except when fibs are the most tempting.”