In International Diplomacy, Appearances Matter. And Trump Knows it.

Presidential historians will remind you that when Mikhail Gorbachev first met Ronald Reagan on a cold Geneva morning in 1985, Gorbachev was wearing a heavy top coat and scarf while Reagan, 20 years his elder, emerged to greet him with no coat at all. That meeting produced little more than a first public impression favorable to the US president, but Soviet officials griped about it for years. Their man was on the backfoot before he’d even heard the sound of Reagan’s voice.

Donald Trump may not get more out of US relations with China than Barack Obama did, but he certainly made a bigger impression with his first meeting with its president. In November 2009, Obama’s first visit with China’s Hu Jintao took place in Beijing as part of a multi-country Asian tour. Knowing that recovery from the worst financial crisis in 80 years left Obama with much less negotiating leverage with his country’s largest creditor, Chinese officials detained dissidents in advance of Obama’s visit and cancelled the wide broadcast of a town hall-style meeting that Obama hoped would give him a direct channel to Chinese youth. A photograph of Obama staring down at his notes during a stern lecture on trade policy from President Hu left a less-than-favorable impression with US media.

China’s President Xi Jinping didn’t offer Trump much more than Hu gave Obama, but the optics were strikingly different. First, it took place at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida Xanadu, in opulent surroundings that spotlight Trump’s personal wealth. Trump’s plane reportedly landed in Florida an hour after Xi’s, making him late to his own party, a bit of swagger worthy of Vladimir Putin. If that didn’t get Xi’s attention, maybe he was more impressed by Trump’s decision to order a barrage of Tomahawk missiles into Syria during the party. Trump followed the meeting with a tweet that signaled confident skepticism on US-China trade ties, and then he sent an aircraft carrier and several warships cruising ominously toward North Korea.

Obama defenders will say that 2009 and 2017 gives us a before-and-after photo of the Obama presidential legacy. In 2009, he was still managing an historic financial meltdown inherited from a Republican predecessor. In 2017, a new president was able to bargain with leverage created by an Obama-engineered recovery.

But in international diplomacy, appearances matter. If you have to explain yourself, you’ve probably already lost. 

***

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group, foreign affairs columnist at TIME and Global Research Professor at New York University. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.