On the surface, the hastily arranged face-to-face meeting between President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appears to have the ability to make the world a safer place. But like almost everything that happens with each leader, far too much remains below the surface for anyone to know for sure.

For Trump’s supporters, the president’s meeting was a total breakthrough that brought the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. The several public handshakes between him and Kim put the president on a secure path to the Nobel Peace Prize.

For the president’s detractors, no matter how the optics looked, the Singapore summit amounted to little more than a photo op with no substance. They feel Trump was either naive or deluded to trust a bloodthirsty North Korean regime that has crushed all human rights for its people and starved millions to make funds available for its massive military budget. The summit was just one more foreign policy stumble for the president after he stirred up turmoil at the G-7 meeting in Canada.

Television pundits tend to be split between the increasingly far left perspective and the “Trump can do no wrong” perspective of Fox News. In these days of zero-sum-game rhetoric, where can one find a clear-eyed analysis of the significance of the Singapore summit? 

A thoughtful blog post by Scott A. Snyder distributed by the Council on Foreign Relations contains some cogent observations about the Trump-Kim talks in Singapore.

According to Snyder, Trump and Kim “changed the trajectory of the U.S.-North Korea relationship from confrontation to cooperation…This meeting has bought time to address North Korea’s nuclear threat and reduced the risk of near-term military conflict.” Although Snyder offers high praise for the positive aspects of the agreement, he warns that “Kim Jong Un does not appear to have reciprocated U.S. concessions. This is concerning given North Korea’s track record of pocketing concessions rather than delivering quid pro quos.”

Snyder makes a telling point by noting Kim’s clever failure to deliver anything in return for the major concessions made by Trump. One needs only to look back at the fiasco of the 1994 Agreed Upon Framework hammered out between President Bill Clinton and Kim’s father, the late Kim Il Sung.  

Under that ill-fated agreement, the United States and its allies agreed to supply North Korea with all it needed to construct nuclear weapons — including heavy water, aluminum tubes, yellow cake and enriched uranium — on the condition that those materials be used only for peaceful energy needs. 

As is now painfully obvious, North Korea never fulfilled the terms of that one-sided deal. Instead, it proceeded to use those very materials to develop and successfully test several powerful nuclear weapons.

With that history, it’s far too early to start opening bottles of champagne and engraving Nobel prizes in the wake of Singapore. Instead, everyone should heed the negotiating advice of the late President Ronald Reagan that he used in making deals with the former Soviet Union: “Trust, but verify. Trust, but cut the cards.”

Moving away from brinksmanship and bellicose actions is something to celebrate. But we must learn from past mistakes and make sure that North Korea does not fool us with another game of bait and switch.