They’re afraid of the spectre of communism.
It’s like that marching at the beginning of Hell March 2, quietly getting louder and louder, for years and years. Then the guitar riff kicks in and suddenly communism’s back baby. Right now they can hear the marching, it’s quiet and in the distance… but they are afraid.
Indeed, now that they’re no longer able to prevent trade with DPRK and Cuba, they’re going to develop rapidly and all the propaganda about communism stifling development is going to fall apart. Everyone will see that it was US blockade on these countries that was preventing them from developing.
I hope that’s the case, the very first thing they need to look at is increasing the country’s power production capacity so that stable electricity can be supplied everywhere all at once instead of just Pyongyang. Hitting that milestone will result in a considerable amount of progress as the population will be able to do a lot more with less, people will have less chores due to the electrification and appliances that shorten time spent on such tasks which will open up people’s time to doing more, both leisure and productive work in their spare time.
That and much more modern heavy machinery for many of the agricultural tasks the country has.
Robotics for factories would be a huge boon because they could reduce factory workforces enormously and push that labour towards other tasks.
