The same "can do" attitude that lead to them losing every single one of those wars? No thank you.

You can run Deepseek R1 on your local machine

It's the only offer on the table. Trump has changed the game, every country is getting tariffs. Vietnam is not willing to play hardball with their largest export market.

What products can the United States sell in Vietnam that will displace Vietnamese industries? Virtually nothing. Everything the United States makes is far too expensive or useless to be of any benefit to Vietnamese consumers, nor is American manufacturing at all a threat to Vietnamese manufacturing. The United States exports mostly agricultural products like soybeans and cotton to Vietnam, as well as some cameras and probably some computer chips. Total exports are around $10 billion (compared to Vietnamese exports to the US, ~$115 billion). So even if that doubles, that's not really doing much.

Vietnam's median income is around $9000USD. They're not buying $90k+ pickups and SUVs lol, even if their infrastructure could support cars of that size. The next step up from mopeds is a ~$5k small Chinese EV, not a giant SUV.

It's because North Korea has no bourgeois class to speak of; both Russia and Iran have a ton of rich businessmen who desperately want to normalise with the West so they can make more money. This class of people simply does not exist in North Korea. Likewise, let's say you want to bribe a North Korean to work with you; how the fuck do you even pay them? Pay them with what? North Korea is entirely cut off from the global financial system, there's no workarounds that exist, unlike places like Russia and Iran.

You combine this with the DPRK state taking collaboration and intelligence far more seriously because it's a communist state, not just a global South aligned would be capitalist state like Russia or Iran. The DPRK is run by communists who watched the United States devastate their country in living memory, they take security extremely seriously. There's a reason the DPRK has nukes and Iran doesn't, and it's entirely because of this difference. Communists have no hope that they'll be able to work with the West, they see no benefit to working in good faith with those who would seek them dead.

Well you just listed one point of leverage right there. Canada doesn't have to trade with the United States. It could reorient its economy around exports to places like China rather than the US. It could try to develop its own internal market, take down barriers to trade between states, and rely less on exports entirely. It could take temporary pain, withholding exports to the United States entirely until they get a better deal (ie play hardball like China). These are all realistic options that are available to Canada, but because the Canadian leadership believes Canada should be a vassal state to the United States, it is virtually impossible that they pursue any of these options.

Is this too much of a radical idea?

Whoa whoa whoa, but if China does that, how are they going to get called a Big Boy by the IMF and Kissinger's acolytes? You're forgetting what really matters here. Mammon demands his share.

Needs to be said that Kafka's "Metamorphosis" is not about being scared of becoming a bug, it's about being so socially isolated and invisible in the modern world because you're just a cog in a machine that you feel as if you're nothing better than a bug. And once you can't contribute anymore, once you can't labour even your family will discard of you like the bug you are.

I mean they have a lot of leverage, they're just totally unwilling to use it because it would mean aligning away from the ideological camp of "The West" and stopping being a resource colony of the United States. So long as they're committed to being an American vassal state (which they 100% are) they have no leverage.

No, growth in the party is slowly intentionally because the party was taking on too many people who weren't really "communists" in any political sense, and were just using the party to get ahead. Crendentialism basically. So the party tightened up requirements to entry, making it far more difficult to actually join to weed out the people who were doing so just to like join a new social club to socially climb.

Don't want to minimize the genocide one bit, since it's truly horrific, but the bloodiest 21st century war is the Second Congo War which had around four million deaths. Besides, the genocide in Gaza can hardly be called a "war" at all.