ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Charis Chang   FROM the outside North Korea looks like an impoverished state cut off from the rest of the world. But during its weekend procession , the isolated regime managed to put on an impressive display of its rockets and military strength, in defiance of growing American warnings about its military capability. While many have the impression of North Korea being a poor country that can’t feed its own people, Leonid Petrov told news.com.au that it had large stockpiles of natural resources that it used to fund its weapons research. “North Korea is a mountainous country that has huge natural resources including deposits of high quality coal, gold, silver, uranium, iron ore and rare earth metals,” said Dr Petrov, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific. He said North Korea had exported its minerals to allies such as China and the Soviet Union for decades until the collapse of the communist bloc. Since then it had been more proactiv...

Aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, guided-missile destroyer USS Wayne E Meyer and guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Champlain in a photo exercise with Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyers in the Philippine Sea in March CREDIT: US NAVY When US president Donald Trump boasted early last week that he had sent an "armada" as a warning to North Korea , the aircraft carrier strike group he spoke of was still far from the Korean peninsula, and headed in the opposite direction. It was even farther away over the weekend, moving through the Sunda Strait and then into the Indian Ocean, as North Korea displayed what appeared to be new missiles at a parade and staged a failed missile test. The US military's Pacific Command explained on Tuesday that the strike group first had to complete a shorter-than-initially planned period of training with Australia. But it was now "proceeding to the Western Pacific as ordered," it said.  Follow FOX Busine...