To be clear, I'm not making accusations about Vietnam, I was just thinking about it and found it a little strange.
I can think of some fairly plausible reasons, but just because those reasons are plausible doesn't mean they're actually correct, so I was wondering if anybody had a more concrete historical and materialist understanding of the situation.
Vietnam liberated itself from occupation and reunified under a single Marxist-Leninist government. It has a population of 100 million people. It decisively defeated the US militarily. All of this gives it a very strong position to engage with the global economy. Korea remains divided and under occupation, the DPRK has a population of only about 26 million, far less than half of the peninsula's, and remains in a state of frozen conflict with the US and its proxies. It has no power to leverage on the global stage.
So if North Vietnam and South Vietnam were still separate countries, do we reckon that North Vietnam would be a lot like the DPRK right now?
The other thing is not that the DRPK refuses to cooperate with the US, but that the US refuses to cooperate with the DRPK. It the US was willing to lift the sanctions and open democratic channels, the DPRK would not refuse. If they could get the deal Vietnam or China has, they'd take it.
This already happened with the nuclear deals made in the 90s/00s where they took the agreed upon steps in good faith, but the US shafted them. Why bother?
I think it would be much more comparable, yeah.
This is 100% correct. Looking past the 🤓 arguments about "technically in a state of war or not", the US fought a war against Vietnam and completely lost, while their war against the DPRK is in a stalemate. They're still doing military exercises to demonstrate this, and the CIA did a lot of fuckery to help exacerbate the problems during the arduous march in the 90s.
I imagine if the DPRK had won as decisively as Vietnam did, then they equally wouldn't be opposed to re-establishing economic relations