Mark Kleiman comes up with a great challenge

"Does anyone have a theory about how announcing a plan to reduce troop levels in South Korea, without getting any sort of promise in return from the North Koreans, is supposed to be a good idea? I'm not asking for anything definitive, just a hint about how this could possibly come out on the plus side."

Robert J Bush is up for anything
rjb- "Professor Kleiman you see we have to try to understand Kim Jong Il's beliefs, which is hard, because he is crazy. He seems to genuinely believe that the US might invade North Korea soon. This would explain the sudden acceleration of the North Korean nuclear program after Bush's axis of evil state of the nation address.
Matt Yglesias explains the issue much better than I could (he tends to to that).

"Thus North Korea found itself featured in the 2002 State of the Union address as a charter member of the “axis of evil” (...). The hawks hoped that the regime would fall apart before it built nukes. Things didn’t work out that way.
North Korean President Kim Jong-Il concluded that because Bush clearly meant to invade Iraq, had broken off negotiations with his regime, and was now lumping the two together as “evil,” he might soon find himself targeted. The result -- a result that even a moderately engaged chief executive would have foreseen -- was a North Korean rush to acquire nuclear weapons that could deter U.S. invasion before it was too late. "

This was a highly unfortunate outcome. It would have been nice to obtain North Korean concessions in exchange for the reduction of troop levels, but it is almost impossible to negotiate with North Korea. This unilateral gesture may have been the only way to convince them that we do not intend to invade them any time soon.

Then when we have lulled them into a false sense of security we can kick their butts. Who cares if they have a few nukes they can't nuke us."

Well I'd say rjb was doing OK until he lost control in that last sentence.