The Beeb once had (and perhaps still has) a great segment called “without comment” in which clips of incredible things are played.  Here’s your print version of our own “without comment” today, from yesterday’s jaw-dropping daily State Department presser discussing the suspension of food aid to North Korea.

Our one-time giving of aid will eventually be forgotten. The United Statesneeds long-term programs that will improve our international image.

The US government has funded agricultural disaster aid programs for nearly a century, mainly on an ad hoc basis between 1970 and 2008. The new Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments (SURE) program for crops is the budgetary and economic-efficiency elephant in the disaster aid policy room.

For East Asian politicos, there’s not that much to grab headline attention in the world’s most economically dynamic region. Or maybe there is.

As the international community and the US discovered in the early 1990s, getting humanitarian aid to needy Somalis is not an apolitical undertaking. It may not even be possible without being drawn into conflict in the Horn of Africa once again.

Even those who have never negotiated with North Korea could have told the Obama administration, “I told you so.”

We have seen what nearly two decades of timid, supine humanitarian aid has brought the North Korean people: food insecurity without end. Isn't it time to fashion an aid program as if the North Korean people really mattered?

North Korea is testing how much the Obama administration will give to maintain the fiction of diplomatic progress.