A new UN report confirms that North Korea is coming off best in its dealings with Donald Trump. The US president has little to show for his trips to south-east Asia, while the North Koreans are mainly getting what they want – international status while busting sanctions and selling arms. But how much is anyone else bothered?
Uncovering the murkier details of the international arms trade is never easy: one of the best books on the subject, Andrew Feinstein’s ‘The Shadow War’, is all too appropriately named. The more controversial elements quite often only come to light by accident, sometimes through courts of law – the Lockheed case back in the 1970s being a prime example.
Occasionally the lid lifts in other ways. The latest annual report from the UN’s Panel of Experts monitoring group on North Korea is one such. It reveals that two North Korean government departments, the Ministry of Military Equipment (MME) and the Korean Mining Development Trading Organisation, have sold a range of conventional weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen as well as customers in Sudan and Libya.
