He is a delusional narcissist who will fight until his last breath. Or an impulsive showman who will hop the next flight out of town when cornered. Or maybe he’s a psychopath, a coldly calculating strategist — crazy, like a desert fox.

The endgame in Libya is likely to turn in large part on the instincts of Moammar Gadhafi, and any insight into those instincts would be enormously valuable to policy makers. Journalists have formed their impressions from anecdotes, or from his actions in the past; others have seized on his recent tirades about al-Qaida and President Barack Obama.

But at least one group has tried to construct a profile based on scientific methods, and its conclusions are the ones most likely to affect U.S. policy. For decades, analysts at CIA and the Department of Defense have compiled psychological assessments of hostile leaders like Gadhafi, Kim Jong Il of North Korea and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, as well as allies, potential successors and other prominent officials. (Many foreign governments do the same, of course.)

Diplomats, military strategists and even presidents have drawn on those profiles to inform their decisions — in some cases to their benefit, in other cases at a cost.

The political profile “is perhaps most important in cases where you have a leader who dominates the society, who can act virtually without constraint,” said Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist who directs the political psychology program at George Washington University and founded the CIA branch that does behavioral analysis. “And that has been the case here, with Gadhafi and Libya.”

The official dossiers are classified. But the methods are well known. Civilian psychologists have developed many of the techniques, drawing mostly on public information about a given leader: speeches, writings, biographical facts, observable behavior. The resulting forecasts suggest that “at-a-distance profiling,” as it is known, is still more an art than a science. So in a crisis like the one in Libya, it is crucial to know the assessments’ potential value and real limitations.

“Expert profilers are better at predicting behavior than a blindfolded chimpanzee, all right, but the difference is not as large as you’d hope it would be,” said Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” who has done profiling of his own. “There’s no secret sauce, and my impression is that often the process can be rushed,” as a leader suddenly becomes a person of intense interest.

First study: Hitler

The method with the longest track record is modeled on clinical case studies, the psychobiographies that therapists create when making a diagnosis, citing influences going back to the sandbox. The first one on record, commissioned in the early 1940s by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, was of Adolf Hitler; in it, the Harvard personality specialist Henry Murray speculated freely and luridly about Hitler’s “infinite self-abasement,” “homosexual panic” and Oedipal tendencies.

Analysts still use this clinical-case approach but now ground it far more firmly in biographical facts than on Freudian speculation or personal opinion. In a profile of Gadhafi for Foreign Policy magazine, Post concludes that the dictator, while usually rational, is prone to delusional thinking when under pressure — “and right now, he is under the most stress he has been under since taking over the leadership of Libya.”

Gadhafi sees himself as the ultimate outsider, the Muslim warrior fighting impossible odds, Post argues, and he “is indeed prepared to go down in flames.”

Characterizations of this type have been invaluable in the past. In preparation for the Camp David peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt, the CIA provided President Jimmy Carter with profiles of both nations’ leaders, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. In his memoir “Keeping Faith,” Carter credited the profiles with giving him crucial insights that helped close a peace deal.

The brief on the Egyptian president, “Sadat’s Nobel Prize Complex,” noted that Sadat “sees himself as a grand strategist and will make tactical concessions if he is persuaded his overall goals will be achieved,” and added, “His self-confidence has permitted him to make bold initiatives, often overriding his advisers’ objections.”

Intelligence specialists have learned to hedge their bets over the years, supplementing case histories with “content analysis” techniques, which look for patterns in a leader’s comments or writings. For instance, a software program developed by a researcher at Syracuse University, Margaret Hermann, evaluates the relative frequency of certain categories of words (like “I,” “me,” “mine”) in interviews, speeches and other sources and links the scores to leadership traits.

A technique used by David Winter, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, draws on similar sources to judge leaders’ motives, in particular their need for power, achievement and affiliation. The sentence “We can certainly wipe them out” reflects a high power orientation; the comment “After dinner, we sat around chatting and laughing together” rings of affiliation.

“Combine high power and high affiliation, the person is likely to reach out, whereas power and low affiliation tend to predict aggression,” said Winter, who has profiled presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, among many others. “That’s the idea, though of course you can’t predict anything with certainty.”