“States like [Iraq, Iran and North Korea] and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” George W. Bush famously said in his 2002 State of the Union address. Soon after, the U.S. directly confronted Iraq. Today it is apparently comfortable enough with Iran as to be negotiating with it. And now, it looks as though it is ready to consider something of a “mission accomplished” for the North Korean part of this triumvirate.

North Korea will be removed from Washington’s official list of state sponsors of terror, the Weekly Standard reported October 11.

Why the change? It actually has no apparent basis in a reduction of the North Korean threat. Just this past week North Korea banned UN inspectors from its nuclear facilities. For this improvement in status, Pyongyang isn’t even promising to give up its nuclear program. The Standard reports,

“There is no formal written agreement,” says a former top Bush administration official. “The North Koreans haven’t signed anything. We are taking them off the terrorist list based on oral understandings and clarifications. This isn’t diplomacy, it’s lunacy.”A senior adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain blasted the deal as a “delusion” and suggested that the administration is seeking agreements for their own sake, not because they make the country safer.”Few regimes have proven themselves less trustworthy than North Korea. We keep easing sanctions and ignoring our allies’ concerns, but verifiable denuclearization doesn’t get any closer,” says a senior McCain adviser. “That is hardly successful diplomacy; it is delusion.”

An earlier U.S. promise to remove Pyongyang’s terror-sponsoring status was contingent upon a declaration of its nuclear activities. The declaration came—and patently failed to mention even the known aspects of North Korea’s nuclear program.

Apparently the thinking in Washington is, Since we can’t trust North Korea to tell us the truth about what it’s up to, there’s no use forcing it to pretend to tell us. Let’s drop the charade—and just change its status regardless.

For more on the significance of Washington’s appeasement of North Korea, read Joel Hilliker’s “Exploding Fictions.”