President Donald Trump’s extensive five-nation Asia tour concluded abruptly on Tuesday when he skipped a meeting with regional leaders in the Philippines and headed back to the United States. “It’s been an incredible 12 days. I’ve enjoyed it immensely,” Trump said while leaving the East Asia Summit in Manila. Sounding more like an insecure social climber than the leader of the world’s lone superpower, he added, “I’ve made a lot of friends at the highest level.”

Making friends, not making deals, was the major theme of Trump’s trip. “My feeling toward you is incredibly warm,” Trump told Chinese President Xi Jinping. “We have great chemistry. I think we’ll do tremendous things, China and the U.S.” He was equally enthusiastic about Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, saying they had an “extraordinary relationship,” and adding, “We like each other, and our countries like each other, and I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to Japan than we are right now.” Trump also boasted of his “great relationship” with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and laughed when the autocrat denounced reporters as “spies.”

Trump believes strongly in bilateral diplomacy and in his own mastery of the “art of the deal,” and he scorns alliance systems (like NATO and the United Nations) and the lumbering bureaucracy of the State Department. So it’s only natural that his major foreign policy tactic is cultivating personal ties with foreign leaders, with all the awkward handshakes that requires. He even sees hostile powers in personal terms, as seen in his aggrieved tweets about North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un:

Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2017

“Trump thinks of himself as the only person who matters on foreign policy, he equates good personal relationships with foreign leaders as good foreign policy,” Washington Post columnist Daniel Drezner wrote on Monday. “This is one reason Trump goes out of his way to be nice to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. It’s also why other countries are smart enough to give him the red-carpet treatment.”

Whether all this glad-handing will result in real accomplishments remains to be seen; Trump reportedly will hold an event later this week to discuss the Asia trip’s results. But the trip’s central failure is already apparent: Trump’s utter neglect of soft power. As passionate as he was about making friends and negotiating deals in Asia, he was completely uninterested in the more public diplomacy of engaging with its citizens. That’s starkly distinct from his last trip abroad, to Europe, where he used soft power to energize the populist masses in Poland—and effectively so, based on Saturday’s enormous demonstration in Warsaw, where banners called for “White Europe” and “Clean Blood.”