Barely a fortnight after the fairly successful summit with Vladimir Putin and three months after the second summit with Donald Trump came a cropper, North Korea has ratcheted up the pressure on the United States with Saturday’s live-fire drill of long-range multiple rocket launchers and an unspecified number of tactical guided weapons.

No less critical must be the fact that President Kim Jong-un watched the drill, and thus accorded to himself what they call an “observer status”. While there is no reaction yet from the ideologically compatible Kremlin or the equally antagonistic White House, Pyongyang’s admission came a day after South Korea’s military detected North Korea’s launch of several unidentified shortrange projectiles into the sea off its eastern coast.

In a signal to the likes of President Trump, Kim is reported to have expressed “great satisfaction” over Saturday’s drills, even emphasising that his frontline troops should keep a “high-alert posture” and enhance combat ability to “defend the political sovereignty and economic self-sustenance of the country”. Thus has he tried to blend the North’s geostrategy with economic compulsions.

While the second cannot be denied, the muscle-flexing is a different kettle of fish altogether. That signal must be unnerving too for South Korea which has promptly rebuked the North for escalating military tensions on the divided peninsula by firing a series of “unidentified short-range projectiles” into the sea, whose waters are now ever so diplomatically choppy. In retrospect, it was the South Korean President, Moon Jae-in, who had played the honest broker to bring Trump and Kim to the negotiating table, first in Singapore (June 2018) and then in Hanoi (February 2019).

In less than a year, Seoul’s diplomacy has turned out to be an abortive endeavour. Small wonder that Mr Kim now feels bold to effect yet another blast into the sea. The launches have apparently been designed to serve as a warning to the US after the failure of a denuclearisation summit in Hanoi.

North Korea had hoped to get US sanctions lifted at the February meeting, but Trump walked away, claiming that Pyongyang was not prepared to go far enough in dismantling its nuclear weapons programme. The US President, it now appears, was remarkably prescient. President Trump’s tweet soon after Saturday’s launch is merely an expression of hope ~ “Anything in this very interesting world is possible, but I believe that Kim Jong-un fully realises the great economic potential of North Korea, and will do nothing to interfere or end it.

He also knows that I am with him and does not want to break his promise to me. Deal will happen!” In reality, the firing of explosives echoes the frustration of the North, which could revive the confrontation if there is no breakthrough in the stalemate.