Honestly, I consider the CEO of JP Morgan a bigger existential threat to humankind than any of those places.

Russia, Iran, North Korea

Ehhh.

I mean, North Korea doesn’t have the resources to do much most of the time. Yeah, they’re well-positioned for this conflict, because they’ve spent a relatively-high chunk of resources they do have on artillery and maintained that over time, built a stockpile. Artillery is a bottleneck on Russia in Ukraine. So they’re potentially a factor in Russia’s invasion in Ukraine.

But they just don’t have the ability to change much in the world, most of the time.

Not that Iran or Russia are exactly in prime condition either, but they aren’t at the kind of level where feeding the population is regularly a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea

Per capita GDP: $640

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran

Per capita GDP: $5,310

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia

Per capita GDP: $14,391

Big difference between those.

Any resources they want to spend on fighting with other countries needs to come out of that, and they have some basic costs like feeding their population that they have to cover before the option to do other things with remaining resources comes up.