PERVERSE INCENTIVES: The worse North Korea acts, the more cash aid it gets.

“For Pyongyang, it pays to provoke,” Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korean Studies professor at Tufts University, told CNBC on Monday. “Whereas good behavior buys only indifference from its richer neighbors, being a bad apple buys leverage and billions in aid.”

The same countries admonishing North Korea leader Kim Jong Un for nuclear belligerence still shell out large sums of diplomatic aid under the motive of “damage-control diplomacy, i.e. getting the North to back off and stay out of the headlines for a while,” Lee said. “Exporting insecurity is [Pyongyang’s] time-tested means to reaping concessions.”

Over the past quarter-century, the pariah state has amassed $20 billion worth of cash, food, fuel, and medicine from the U.S., Japan, China and South Korea. That’s come from “repeated lies of denuclearization,” according to Lee, who has testified as an expert witness at U.S. government hearings on North Korea policy.

Maybe it’s time to try something different.

UPDATE: Something different.