The United States-North Korea summit ended with warm words but without substance to back them up.

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, made no real concessions on his country’s nuclear programme.

And the performance of President Donald Trump at the closing press conference was characteristically bizarre, with the US president urging his audience to think of North Korea “from a real estate perspective”.

The scepticism, however, should not obscure the fact that the situation on the Korean peninsula is now considerably less alarming than it was a year ago.

Last August Mr Trump was threatening North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen”, as the Kim regime issued blood-curdling threats to the “mentally deranged US dotard” in the White House.

Behind the hot rhetoric was a genuine risk of conflict. So there is good reason to be thankful that the leaders of the US and North Korea are now engaging with each other in more civil terms.

At this stage, Mr Trump appears to have made the bigger concessions. Simply agreeing to a summit with Mr Kim handed the North Korean dictator considerable prestige.

The North Koreans’ commitment to “complete denuclearisation” has been made in the past. Without details on verification, inspection and timetables, the promise has little value.

What is more, Mr Trump offered a major concession to North Korea, promising to suspend America’s joint military exercises with South Korea.

This move may well have come as a nasty surprise to the South Korean military.

The fact that Mr Trump justified it partly on the grounds that the military exercises cost a lot of money — and embraced North Korea’s argument that the exercises are “provocative” — will have done little to reassure America’s regional allies about the steadfastness of the US commitment to their security.

There is some reason to conclude that Mr Kim outfoxed Mr Trump comprehensively and postponed, if not eliminated, the military threat to his regime.

But the final score will not be known for some time yet.

Remember why the Korean crisis intensified over the past year. The fact that North Korea has nuclear weapons has been known for some years.

The new development was that the Kim regime was developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), with the aim of deploying a nuclear weapon that could directly threaten the US mainland.

It was this threat that caused the Trump administration to contemplate a first-strike military assault on North Korea.

That, in turn, would almost certainly have led to a wider regional war, costing thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of lives.

If North Korea resumes testing of ICBMs in the near future then the Singapore summit will have genuinely achieved nothing, and the world will soon be heading back towards the days of “fire and fury”.

However, if the Kim regime takes advantage of the new atmosphere of detente to quietly freeze its plans to develop nuclear missiles that directly threaten the US, the Trump administration can claim genuine progress.

And the wider world would also have cause for relief because the risk of war on the Korean peninsula will have diminished substantially.

It is not enough to stop there. Mr Trump promised to start the process of denuclearisation “very quickly”.

His administration must translate that pledge into progress on decommissioning North Korea’s nuclear stockpile.

Only if officials can do that will the Singapore summit mark a decisive step towards peace. THE FINANCIAL TIMES