After weeks of hype and hope — and a bizarre cancellation that didn’t quite stick — the Singapore summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un is now history. And history it was: no sitting US president had ever met with a North Korean leader. Pushed by South Korea and his insatiable desire for self-aggrandizing spectacle, Trump broke with decades of US policy — and peace on the peninsula lurched forward.

The joint statement that emerged from the summit has been widely characterized as a “deal,” largely due to the Trump’s administration’s flawed messaging and promises of a miraculous breakthrough. High expectations for a landmark agreement have led to criticisms of the statement’s obvious thinness, some of them warranted. The administration’s inability to even secure an official nuclear and missile test moratorium from the North (which has not tested a missile in more than six months) was particularly puzzling. Codifying the current freeze, with the possible addition of a halt on weapons production, would have been a positive and relatively simple step.

Yet the joint statement is not really a deal. It is, at base, a declaration of shared principles and a starting point for sustained negotiations between the US and North Korea. It outlines four broad goals — an improvement in US-DPRK relations, the establishment of a “peace regime” on the peninsula, “complete denuclearization” of the Koreas, the recovery of POW/MIA remains — and commits both parties to holding talks “at the earliest possible date” to hash out how to meet these objectives. It is the latter commitment that matters most for now. The Trump administration is talking with North Korea instead of threatening to eradicate it.