If Donald Trump’s foreign policy is any less damaging than it appears, it’s only because he has set the bar so low. Such thoughts were hard to avoid as we viewed split screens yesterday of dozens of unarmed Gazans getting killed by Israeli security forces while Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Sheldon Adelson celebrated peace at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Of course, the consequences of bad foreign-policy decisions tend to reveal themselves months or years after the fact, so what Trump sows today we may not reap for many tomorrows. But how much he has sowed! Without looking at notes: he has withdrawn from trade agreements, from climate accords, and from the nuclear deal with Iran. He has bombed Syria, backed Saudi Arabia in a war with Yemen, and taunted Russia over its missile capability. And that is leaving out countless less-noticed actions like calling for regime change in places like Venezuela. We’re just getting started on the consequences. Just how bad is it, then?

Before we get to the bad stuff, we should at least try to make a case, however far-fetched, for why Trump’s foreign policy could be shrewder than it seems, animated by a grand vision and plan. So let’s give it a whirl.

First, every president deserves a certain amount of leniency concerning foreign policy, which tends to be a lineup of bad choices. While a general set of principles and rules can undergird one’s approach to it, summed up in words like “globalist” or “nationalist,” “neoconservative” or “non-interventionist,” every day brings unique dilemmas for which no formula offers easy answers. Even a resolute non-interventionist would have qualms about standing aside while Rwanda’s Hutus massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, especially given the low cost of stepping in. At the same time, even a humanitarian hawk must know there will always be inconvenient consequences from such a move. U.S. intervention in Libya, at the moment it happened, was driven heavily by a gut impulse to prevent atrocities against protesters, but the long-term effects were immense: regime change, chaos in the country, mass migration from Africa to Europe, and determination by North Korea to race toward nuclear arms.

Second, to the disadvantage of any leader in the public eye, we also have a much easier time assigning foreign-policy blame than foreign-policy credit, for good reason. One bad actor can easily make a giant mess, while many good actors can only with difficulty create order. A country managing foreign affairs is often like a golden retriever playing in a dog run. It can spread a lot of trouble or find a safe place for itself, but it can’t exert much control over its companions. For that reason, we can fairly easily blame George W. Bush for most of the disasters that befell Iraq after we invaded in 2003. Bush had the single-handed power to start that war or prevent it. But how much do we credit Ronald Reagan for the end of communism in Eastern Europe? Or Jimmy Carter for Egyptian-Israeli peace? Both deserve credit, for sure, but success was possible only because of a lucky collection of players. It’s therefore easy to point to Trump’s failures and dismiss any of his successes.

Third, if I wanted to persuade myself that Donald Trump was, in fact, a foreign-policy miracle worker rather than a joker, I’d put forth the Double-Nobel-Prize theory. Trump wins his first Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace on the Korean peninsula. This becomes possible because Trump chose to break an impasse by upending the table. Since relations with North Korea have ranged between murderous and icy for the past 60-plus years, Trump ratcheted up the threats and outdid Kim Jong Un in bellicosity, causing North Korea to blink. Trump wins his second Nobel by listening to Israel and Saudi Arabia and withdrawing from the nuclear proliferation deal with Iran and imposing sanctions so tough that Tehran’s influence in the region shrinks drastically. The Palestinians, with a weaker negotiating position, accept a non-generous but unambiguous two-state solution, at which point diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and several other countries in the region are established.