NORTH KOREA test-fired two ballistic missiles today after promising an “offensive and overwhelming” response to US-led military exercises off its coast.

Operation Freedom Edge, which ended at the weekend, was the first “multidomain trilateral drill” between the US, Japan and South Korea, and featured a US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

A multidomain drill involves co-ordinated activity across the “domains” of air, sea, land, space and cyberspace. 

The US has been working for years to draw Japan and South Korea — key Far Eastern allies hosting 50,000 and 30,000 US troops respectively, but with traditionally fraught bilateral relations — into co-ordinated action as part of efforts to militarily encircle China. The official excuse for the drills, though, was an allegedly growing threat from North Korea, which slammed the exercises as a bid to create “an Asian version of Nato.”