Korean War: Win, lose, or Draw for America?

[Lief 🗽]

You have to wonder if the people living in North Korea would have been better off if the communists had taken the entire peninsula. Was North Korea devolving into the dystopian hermit kingdom it currently is inevitable without a hostile South Korea right at its border? (this is not a rhetorical question, I'm hardly an expert on Korea) Probably the people living in South Korea would have been a little worse off, but those living in North Korea would have been many, many times better off if unified communist Korea just evolved into a miniature version of China or something.