Donald Trump struggled to contain a smile as he reached out to offer his hand to Kim Jong Un on Tuesday morning, evidently self-satisfied at making history as the first sitting president of the United States to meet with a leader of North Korea. The handshake itself lasted 13 seconds, with Trump briefly reaching up with his free hand to squeeze Kim’s bicep, in a gesture that could be read as a display of dominance or of solicitous familiarity. And yet, despite Trump’s obvious glee, the denouement of the improbable months-long courtship, which began with the two leaders exchanging threats of nuclear annihilation, amounted to little more than a propaganda win for Kim and a legacy-builder for Trump. “The photo op was the summit for our reality-TV president and for eager-to-be-accepted D.P.R.K.,” a former State Department official who previously worked in the region told me. “Any day of talks is better than a day of missile launches,” they conceded. But it seemed clear, as Trump boarded Air Force One that night to return to Washington, that the self-proclaimed deal-maker had given away more than he had won at the negotiating table.

Trump had sought to downplay expectations before the highly anticipated meeting in Singapore, even as he promoted the event like the Thrilla in Manila. “I think the minimum would be a relationship. We’d start at least a dialogue,” he said over the weekend, casting the summit—a mark of legitimacy that U.S. administrations had resisted giving North Korea for decades—as more of a get-to-know-you than an opportunity for substantive diplomacy. After the meeting with Kim, however, Trump appeared jubilant. “We’re ready to write a new chapter between our nations,” Trump said at a news conference after more than four hours of talks, in which he was joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a presumably fuming John Bolton. According to a joint statement, Kim had “reaffirmed” his commitment to a denuclearized Korean peninsula, and Trump committed that he would “provide security guarantees” to the D.P.R.K.

According to foreign-policy experts, that affirmation is flimsy at best. The statement lacked substance, and Trump offered platitudes rather than concrete details differentiating these talks from the failed negotiations under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush while speaking to reporters. Of the four points in the statement, all were included in past agreements with North Korea, and there was no mention of Kim’s human-rights abuses or the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. Kim did pledge to destroy a missile site in North Korea, but the scope of the promise and the timeline was unclear. “This is a paper-thin agreement” that “does not commit Kim to real compromises and deadlines,” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador who served Clinton and both Bush administrations, told me.

“The statement itself is a joke,” Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury, said bluntly. “It is less than any statement that the North Koreans have ever agreed to in the past. On eliminating nuclear weapons, the North Koreans just reaffirmed the statement that they made with the South Koreans,” he told me. “The president continues to say that Kim is giving up his nuclear weapons. Kim continues to refuse to promise that. I don’t know how long they can keep fudging this.”

Kim, meanwhile, won a major concession from Trump—a pledge that the U.S. will end its joint military exercises with South Korea, which Trump subsequently described as “very provocative” and pricey “war games,” adopting the North Korean party line as his own. Responses within the diplomatic community were varied: “Ceasing or reducing our military exercises isn’t a huge deal,” the former State Department staffer said, noting that the U.S. holds military exercises elsewhere in Asia, and that South Korea is usually involved. The problem, this person added, is that “it does give away something right off the top.”