You do not subjugate a people by taking everything from them. You subjugate them by giving them something they know you can take away. Desperate people aren’t always obedient. Dependent people usually are.
.. You need a 50-year solution to your strategic dilemmas, not just another set of piecemeal concessions from Seoul or Washington. That requires changing the game in East Asia by nudging America out. Whoever is helping you make such astonishing progress in your missile and nuclear programs clearly wants to use you to change the game, too.
.. Drive every wedge you can between Washington and Seoul. Some you get for free: Who else but Donald Trump would think to start a trade war with Seoul in the midst of a nuclear crisis with Pyongyang?
.. Or what if somebody found a Stuxnet-type solution to cripple your only operational refinery or blow up the pipeline through which you import crude from China?
.. Your retaliatory options are few. You can’t simply level Seoul with artillery: that would mean full-scale war and your prompt destruction. When you get down to it, you’re making up in gumption what you lack in nearly every other resource.