Why do leaders of states engage in face-to-face diplomacy? The existing answers to this question largely focus on the private effect of the leaders engaging in the face-to-face meeting or on the public effects created by the mere occurrences of the meetings. This research aims to innovate by looking at the public and the performance side of face-to-face summit diplomacy in the context of the bilateral alliance. The non-substantive visual performances of face-to-face summit meetings can signal the relational status of the summits to the public. I argue that the performances of equivalence (peer-ness) or hierarchy (deference) between the summits affect the domestic public opinion, which ultimately affects the prospect for alliance coordination. In a bilateral alliance, a government can face a dilemma between the conflicting demands of the ally and of its own citizens, which I will coin as the “alliance-public dilemma.” In the Korea-U.S. alliance, the Korean public wants its government to maintain a close and friendly relationship with the U.S. strategically but does not want it to show a weaker and losing stance vis-à-vis the U.S. emotionally. This dual demand puts the Korean government in a dilemma between (1)having to strategically coordinate with (make concessions to) the U.S. and (2)satisfying its citizens, that are highly sensitive to the implicit hierarchy of the two countries. The Korean government can alleviate the dilemma by winning public support through deliberately performing friendliness and peer-ness in face-to-face summit meetings. I studied 17 Korea-U.S. summit meetings during 2002-2021 held in bilateral visits and provided 5 selected case studies. The cases show that a high level of peer-ness performed is linked to high public approval of summitry or to the increased presidential approval rate, while the high level of deference performed is linked to the opposite result, on the condition that the two summits showed friendly relationship.