The spectacle of such summits surely appeals to Trump’s taste for theatrics and ratings bonanzas—for made-for-TV “wins.” But they’re also critical components of a process Trump appears to have pursued with threats of war with North Korea, trade war with the European Union, and now a showdown with Iran: Escalate tensions in order to de-escalate them, and then claim victory. “Begin by hurling insults at the other side,” Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post last week, in summarizing the approach. “Threaten extreme consequences. Then meet with the other side, backpedal and triumphantly announce that you have saved the world from a crisis that your rhetoric and actions caused in the first place.” In the North Korean case, it took eight months for Trump to go from “fire and fury” to offering a summit. In the Iranian case, the shift from threats of unprecedented destruction to offers of unprecedented diplomatic engagement took about a week—though it could always shift back.

The leader-to-leader summit—and especially the private one-on-one sit-down between those leaders without advisers present—is also a pure distillation of what appears to be Trump’s preferred method of handling international affairs: a coercive, transactional, highly personalized bilateralism in which, as the political theorist Danielle Allen recently put it, “global politics is conducted as a series of deals with Donald Trump.” The summit is the foreign-policy equivalent of Trump’s famous declaration during the presidential campaign that, when it came to America’s many afflictions, “I alone can fix it.” The key to resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis is not some unwieldy six-party negotiation, but rather Trump sizing up Kim Jong Un within seconds of meeting him. Trump withdraws from the multinational nuclear deal with Iran and proposes a tête-à-tête with Iran’s leader instead. “We could work something out that’s meaningful,” Trump explained on Monday, “not the waste of paper that the [Iran] deal was.”

Trump administration officials have acknowledged the central role summitry is now playing in the president’s management of foreign relations. “The summit in and of itself is an important deliverable,” Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, told reporters during a briefing call before Trump met Putin in Helsinki, Finland. (National-Security Adviser John Bolton said almost exactly the same thing.) “I would just point to the summit with Kim Jong Un, which has already shown the possibility for reduced tension on the Korean peninsula and certainly throughout Northeast Asia. And if you can imagine what reduced tension could do in the case of U.S.–Russia and Europe–Russia, it would be on a much bigger scale.”

The drawback of this approach is that sometimes a summit is just a summit, not a solution. Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un certainly reduced tensions on the Korean peninsula, but so far it has not resulted in North Korea making any major concessions on its nuclear-weapons program—the reason Trump met with Kim in the first place. The summit with Putin has, in the near term at least, actually increased tensions between the United States and Russia because of Trump’s refusal to confront Putin over Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, without yielding any concrete achievements as of yet—not even a joint-summit statement.