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.
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