Monday’s presidential news tended to the personal and Asian: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte brushed off President Trump’s invitation to visit him in Washington, but Trump surprisingly extended his hand for yet another face-to-face meeting, this one with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “under appropriate circumstances.”

When word broke of Duterte’s brushoff, one may be sure that the President’s political handlers (and both Diplomatic Security and the Secret Service, as well) breathed deep sighs of relief. When word broke of the tentative tender to Kim, it took only minutes for several U.S. Asia-policy “hands” to engage their mouths in ridiculing the President. Thus spoke Ambassador Chris Hill, once in charge of the fruitless Six-Power Talks: “Kim Jong-un would be delighted to meet with President Trump on the basis of one nuclear leader to another. If I were Trump I would pass on that.”

But that need and ought not be the precondition of a direct meeting. The idea of a U.S.-North Korean summit, which is novel coming from the mouth of the President of the United States, bears more thoughtful scrutiny.¹ That said, it remains unclear if the President’s remark is just another random tweet-from-the-hip verbal ejaculation connected to no strategic thought at all, or if this time, since the Administration has formed an approach to North Korea, it may be more deliberate than it might seem. But however it got started, if handled well, the President’s idea (let’s give him the benefit of deserved doubt and call it that) could turn out to be brilliant.

How so? It could be the first step toward a potentially useful transaction in which U.S. diplomacy trades something Kim desperately wants for domestic purposes—recognition as a legitimate interlocutor by the most powerful state on earth—for a reduction in his outsized paranoia and, hence, some benefits down the road. The basic idea is that if we stop treating him as a pariah, it may reduce his incentives to act like one.

The beginning of wisdom in understanding the Korea tangle is the acknowledgement that Kim believes the United States seeks regime change in Pyongyang, for he knows that, if positions were reversed, that is what he would do. That is why we cannot, and never could, end or significantly curtail the nuclear program without using force: It is the regime’s last resort against dangers of the existential sort, so there is nothing we or any other power can give or promise that will balance off against that perception of an ultima ratio.

Regime change in Pyongyang would be nice, of course, and it will happen one day of its own accord. But no compelling reason exists for the United States to actively pursue it now, since none of our allies—notably South Korea—wants to deal anytime soon with the mess it would cause. So why not tell Kim so, directly but privately?

If that, along with the recognition that will flow from a summit, will calm Kim down, we too need to calm down long enough to recognize that, if North Korea ever resorts to nuclear first-use, anywhere, it would lose the ensuing war, its regime would be destroyed, and Kim personally would end up an irradiated cinder. If Kim is nuts, he’s murderously nuts, not suicidally nuts, so I lose no sleep worrying about an unprovoked North Korean attack on the U.S. homeland. Panicky public rhetoric on our part in that regard is unhelpful in every way. In other words, if both nations’ worst fears could be bounded and a bit assuaged, it would establish new parameters for deal-making: That is the promise of the President’s idea, if it is properly handled.

But, of course, it might be handled badly; as that famous 20^th-century philosopher, the Wicked Witch of the West, once put it: “These things must be done delicately.” So what’s the difference between a properly delicate handling and a bad one?

There are two main ways to think about a U.S.-North Korean summit: a way in which we explicitly attempt to link it to the North Korean nuclear program, and a way in which we avoid explicitly linking it, the better to implicitly link it. The former is the wrong way to proceed; the latter is the shrewdly delicate one.

The summit message from the President to Kim Jong-un should be as simple as possible: “I respect you as a national leader, and my Administration does not intend to undermine your regime.” Leave implicit, or for other, lesser officials to say, that North Korea’s conventional and unconventional military programs must never threaten its neighbors, or, as has been the case for decades, the United States and its allies will respond at a time and in a manner of their choosing to restore international peace and security. And then shut up, arm up, and let Kim figure out what it all means. Deterrence flows from deeds implied by power more than it does from declarations. So he will figure it out.

This dual-track approach is preferable to linkage because Kim will likely conclude that any attempt to suffocate his nuclear program is just a prelude to an attempt at regime change, whatever we may say. If we avoid putting the nuclear program front and center, perhaps later, with Kim’s ego suitably inflated and his arse feeling more secure, a differently shaped negotiating proposal designed to contain the nuclear program (not end it—it’s now much too late for that as long as the regime endures) might be possible.²

That is anyway as much as we can expect to accomplish anytime soon, for every other option we can think of is either unavailable or dangerous to excess. Let us count the ways.

Consider what we cannot do. We cannot negotiate our way to ending or even moderating significantly North Korea’s nuclear program. Leverage the Chinese to do it for us, since they have material leverage? We tried that in 2005, arguing that China would suffer most from a regime implosion in the North and suffer from the regime’s endurance, as well, because its behavior works as a goad to Japanese nuclearization. The prospect of a permanently denuclearized reunified Korea under the aegis of the democratic South, in the context of a revised U.S.-ROK relationship that would significantly reduce the U.S. military presence in and near Korea (and hence near China), struck some as a bowl full of tasty carrots from the Chinese perspective. Yet the effort got close to nowhere: The Chinese Communist Party’s worst fear concerning Korea is a unified democratic state lying astride its border, not the U.S.-ROK treaty relationship.

That most likely remains the case. When Xi Jinping “explained” to Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month that China could not press North Korea on account of several tons of historical baggage, he was not being entirely honest. The weight is there, true enough, but that’s not all that’s there. China does have decisive leverage over North Korean regime survival, but it fears to use it because China is a kind of hostage to North Korea at the same time. The tighter the Chinese pull the noose, the more the fallout from incipient regime collapse threatens China with multifarious mayhem: a refugee crisis, for certain, but, even more portentous, a scramble for who picks up the pieces in a melted-down Pyongyang.

So if we can’t negotiate our way out of the problem, wait for regime collapse, or directly impress Chinese power on our behalf, can we intimidate the North into backing its nuclear program down under threat of a preemptive war? That seemed to be the policy gist of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s message, speaking in Seoul on March 16, when he ruled out new negotiations and declared that, “The policy of strategic patience has ended.”

It was brilliant of Tillerson (or his speechwriter), and very generous too, to describe the futile policies of the past quarter century as a sagacious “policy of strategic patience.” But what he said still frightened people, including people in the very (politically roiled) city in which he uttered the remark. Worse, it seemed to relegate U.S. policy choices to feckless passivity, leaning on Beijing, or preemptive war. But we’d have no allies in such a war—neither South Korea nor Japan, for different reasons, would ever be publicly complicit in a military action that killed lots of Koreans—even as we unleashed unknowable but certainly very bloody consequences. It’s foolish to bluff such a course as a means of intimidation. And it wouldn’t work as intimation anyway.

It is in the context of our poverty of promising options that the President’s offer of a direct meeting figures to reshuffle a stale deck. It could thaw the hideously frigid psychological environment we face to possibly useful ends. Of course some will object that to recognize Kim as an interlocutor, even if done in a way that does not reward the existence of the nuclear program, would constitute a human rights atrocity—essentially a pass from the United States for the North Korean regime to do whatever it wants to its own people.

Let me be twice blunt here. First, within limits, the principle of the non-interference of states into the internal affairs of other states remains a wise predicate of the Westphalian system, because it dramatically reduces the sources of conflict and war among states: Cuius regio, eius religio makes as much sense in our ideological age as it did in a more religious one. If some people cannot discover the moral value of that consequence, I am sorry for them. And second, the unfortunate truth is that there is very little the U.S. government can do to ameliorate human rights violations in North Korea, so to argue that symbolic verbal protests should have pride of place over a policy that might do some palpable good is to embarrass moral logic itself.

And if, after all, Kim rejects the invitation to a summit, he would look weaker and even more isolated than he already is. And Trump would look more magnanimous than he surely is. So come on, let’s do it.