On Tuesday, as Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un shook hands for their much-anticipated summit in Singapore, one Korean reporter observed a curious episode. Koreans watching the scene unfold on a TV screen at a railway station in Seoul began applauding. Meanwhile, some nearby Western tourists, perturbed by this development, scratched their heads in confusion.

“I am actually baffled to see them clapping here,” said one British tourist.

There’s perhaps no better symbol of the gulf in worldwide reactions to the summit than this episode. While South Koreans cautiously celebrated a historic step in the thawing of hostilities that have hung over them for almost seventy years, the Western media seemed to look on with alarm — even anger.

Hostility to the summit, much of it from Democrats and liberals, had been a staple of press coverage in the months leading up to it, often from commentators who just a few months earlier had been panicking about exactly the opposite outcome. But it reached a fever pitch over the last few days.

There was, for example, the collective hyperventilation over a symbolic arrangement of North Korean and US flags. There was MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, who warned that the whole summit was actually a “Trumpian head fake,” a mere artifact of Trump’s “midterm strategy” and his “get out of sitting with Bob Mueller strategy.” Sue Mi Terry of the defense contractor–funded Center for Strategic and International Studies cautioned that “a peace treaty is not okay” and should “come at the end of the process” because it “undermines the justification of our troops staying in South Korea.”

But things really ramped up once the summit was over. The signing of the joint statement was met with near-universal derision and skepticism from Western observers and mainstream news outlets, citing a variety of objections: the idea that Trump had “legitimized” Kim and given him a propaganda victory; that he had given too much away with little in return; that he was praising Kim too generously; that he had used the North Koreans’ own rhetoric about “provocative” US military exercises; and the weird and unintentionally hilarious US-made video exalting the greatness of the agreement.

Much of the criticism focused on the fact that Trump had offered to suspend US and South Korean war games — apparently without informing the South Koreans — and to withdraw some troops from the country. (A regular feature of establishment anti-Trump coverage is that he is both an unhinged maniac ready to start war at any moment, and that under no circumstances should he reduce the size and scope of US military power.)

As before, however, it was liberal media that seemed particularly confused and infuriated by the agreement. Rachel Maddow, who once wrote a book about the US addiction to perpetual war, found a way to link the summit to Russia, explaining that Trump’s troop pull-out plan was actually a dangerous giveaway to Putin. “Why did that happen?” Maddow asked about the agreement in brow-strained confusion. “What was that for?” Vox wrote about the “shockingly weak deal,” citing an analyst from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative think tank financed by Republican fundraisers like Sheldon Adelson, which spent years fighting the Iran deal.

“This. Is. Fucking. Nuts,” wrote Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum in reaction to the deal, in a column titled “Donald Trump Abandons South Korea.” Weighing the concessions Kim won against what Trump received (“nothing”), Drum determined that “this whole thing looks like the same kind of train wreck dealmaking that produced the Trump Plaza Hotel.” The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland called the deal “a historic breakthrough — for the Kim dynasty,” citing just about every boilerplate criticism so far listed. Freedland wrote that a “useful way to test the deal” was to imagine what Trump would have said if Obama had negotiated it — an odd point, given that liberals have (rightly) spent years complaining about Trump’s ignorant, bad-faith attacks on the Iran deal.

If this coverage were all one were exposed to, it would be hard to be left with any other impression than that Trump had just single-handedly sealed the doom of South Korea, and indeed the whole world. Which begs the question: why do Koreans themselves seem surprisingly okay with it?