Let’s exhale, be thankful disaster was avoided, and eschew churlishness. Donald Trump deserves credit for taking a giant gamble on something good: peace. That alone distinguishes him from the last Republican president, who, with Iraq, took a giant gamble on the opposite. North Korea wasn’t wrong to observe that other presidents wouldn’t have done this, for better or worse. I should also own that I was wrong to conclude that John Bolton would get his way as a saboteur. Trump gave the Singapore summit a go after all. If Trump’s indifference to seasoned advice seems to work against him 90 percent of the time, it also seems to work for him 10 percent of the time. Maybe, if we’re lucky, historians will come to feel this was such a time.

Finding things to criticize about what happened isn’t hard. Trump decided to show Kim Jong Un a four-minute peace-selling video that, as propaganda, was both clunky and condescending—although, to be fair, North Korean officials should be the last to complain about clunky and condescending propaganda. Trump struck some decidedly false notes, such as when he suggested that Otto Warmbier, the American who died in North Korean custody, “did not die in vain.” There was no need to sentimentalize a cruel, pointless, and indefensible destruction of a young life. Trump conceded more than he needed to and went too far in his flattery. And his tweeting and public statements were, as always, Trumpy from start to finish. The man doesn’t change.

But we all took several steps away from a major war, and South Korea, which has the most at stake, seems to be happy with what happened, mostly. (The decision to suspend joint warfare exercises might be an exception.) The greatest threat of Trump—and it remains so—was always that he would, through incompetence, embroil the country in war. That threat has been greatly diminished now, and Trump looks much less scary. Things may yet go south, and tearing up the nuclear agreement with Iran was ominous, but few things would kill as many people in a matter of days as renewed war on the Korean peninsula.

Some of the more dispiriting critiques of this meeting have come from the left, with many liberals voicing criticisms that sound like they were crafted in the office of Dick Cheney. (When Chuck Schumer and several Democrats teamed up to attack Trump from the right for the Singapore summit, it felt both cynical and damaging.) It’s not clear what they hoped to achieve with this. Folks, we know North Korea is bad. Totalitarianism, gulags, starvation—these are not what you see on a “Best Places to Retire” list. But condemning and isolating an evil regime doesn’t necessarily make life for its people better or life for the rest of us safer. On the contrary, belligerence and isolation can leave everyone worse off, while engagement can change the game.

People have berated Trump for calling it an “honor” to meet with Kim. Well, smoke-blowing has its place. Richard Nixon didn’t need to be reminded of the sins of Mao Tse-tung, someone who had ordered the deaths of millions, overseen an army responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans in Korea, and transformed a culturally lively and diverse country into a joyless multitude of blue-uniformed subjects. But he nevertheless chose to meet with Mao and flatter him about the impact of his writings and thought. He also toasted a roomful of top Chinese communists, sipping Maotai and giving a slight bow to each, prompting a disgusted William F. Buckley to write that the “effect was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor’s stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace Goering and Goebbels and Doenitz and Hess.” Was Nixon conned? No. He saw the benefits of forming an alliance against Moscow, and, despite many peculiarities and contradictions in his personality that could mask it, he considered the pursuit of peace to be one of his highest priorities.