I've watched with trepidation, but approval, at how the Bush administration has handled North Korea for the last couple of years. Their plan has always seemed clear and consistent to me, and based on something the last administration lacked: a thorough understanding that this is a sociopathic regime.

Like sociopaths everywhere, they cannot be trusted under any circumstances. Nor can they be "provoked" in the normal sense of the word, since they do not react like normal human beings to most stimuli.

Sociopaths generally have an unshakable faith that they are smarter than everyone else, and that they are nearly indestructible. They also live in the moment, and never hesitate to put a knife in the back of a best friend, or the closest loved one, in order to gain even the most trivial advantage--or just for minor ego gratification. How they deal with people they view as rivals or enemies is not particularly different.

The only way to deal with sociopaths is to never turn your back on them, and to frustrate them and show their lies for what they are at every opportunity. You never try to placate them, unless you're maneuvering them into a sniper's sights.

The biggest mistake of the entire decade of the 1990s was the deal that gave them nuclear technology, for it was based on the assumption that they were a rational regime.

MSNBC has a pretty good profile of the regime and its leader (the two are virtually synonymous). The main things I take issue with are some of the things Madeline Albright says. She's a bright woman, but Secretary Albright is very wrong to say that Kim Jong Il is not crazy. Yes he is. He is a sociopath.

Sociopaths are often very bright, well-informed, normal-seeming people who connect very well on an intellectual level with the world around them. They are usually not particularly delusional--or they have a few very specific delusions which are not particularly obvious in everyday contact with them. This is one of the things that makes them so dangerous: they don't seem nuts when you meet them.

And by the way, I'm not being condescending toward Albright. People have married sociopaths, only to realize much later what they've gotten themselves into.

How we'll deal with this monster in the long run I do not know. I do know that I'm glad that they were named a member of the Axis of Evil, and am also glad that the people in Washington finally have a realistic attitude about this regime.