Who’s afraid of North Korea?

The colonel looked me in the eye and said: “Aren’t you afraid to be here? We are enemies.” So began a tour of the Demilitarized Zone — from the North Korean side, and of Korea from the North Korean perspective.

For brief three-day periods in October, Americans were allowed for the first time since 2002 to enter North Korea — visitor diplomacy, the North Koreans called it. Like Forrest Gump, depicted as one of the American ping-pong players who was suddenly invited to China years ago by Mao Tse-tung, I seemed suddenly in the right place to witness and abet something that will matter.

Since 2002 it has been impossible for Americans to travel to North Korea. But as a political scientist, I long hoped to see this last, and perhaps strangest, iteration of communist repression. Suddenly I found myself “invited” as part of the North Koreans’ new visitor diplomacy.

My sudden visa approval seemed part of an apparent show of some kind of good faith in the ongoing Kabuki of six-power talks that sputtered forward once more this month. Perhaps, too, the North Koreans were signaling they were serious about tourism — and not just from South Korea (where tourists by the thousands go to carefully controlled destinations.)

If my trip were only a part of the first drops of a much hoped-for wave of Westerners bearing hard currency, it would be good. For the West, tourism could start tethering North Korea, however lightly, to the world. Now the place is a virtually isolated and internationally brigand.

Apart from the impressive subsidy — $2.6 billion — donated by South Korea, North Korea’s other significant source of foreign income is an especially well-crafted “super” U.S. $100 bill produced at two factories in downtown Pyongyang.

My visit was timed to coincide with the Arirang, or mass performances, to celebrate the founding of North Korea’s Communist Party. Some 100,000 performers danced, marched, tumbled, while masses of children held up snap cards that formed gargantuan pictures of great battles, and insistent images of Eternal President Kim Il-sung (the “Great Leader”) and the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il. These “games” were like a Stalinist version of a Busby Berkeley 1930s Hollywood spectacle and part George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”

The “Dear Leader” was supposed to have shown up at the Arirang performance as he did when then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attended a similar event five years ago. Indeed, North Korean TV broadcasts that night showed Mr. Kim seated somewhere near our VIP boxes. But like much else in North Korea, it was fiction. Mr. Kim was not there, really; on TV, there he was in the box, two over from where I sat. He was there, but virtually.

The leadership’s self-proclaimed near-divinity has elements of real absurdity. The North Korean papers claim, for instance, Mr. Kim shot 38 — for 18 holes — the first and last time he ever played golf. It is part of the weird miracles, lies and mass adulation the regime hopes will strengthen its grip on power.

But the clock is ticking on the North Korean regime. Those who worry about a collapsing North Korea and those who welcome it both cite the same facts. The place is a tinderbox and nobody knows how to manage either chaos or a successor regime.

I shook the colonel’s hand at the DMZ and said, “I don’t believe I have any real need to be afraid.” It was a lie. The place scared me.

For all the pervasive propaganda promoting the cult worship, the power-crazed and at least part-time alcoholic leader of North Korea has 23 million people in a cage. Change will come to North Korea, but it won’t be easy.

James Nathan is Khalid bin Sultan Eminent Scholar in political science at Auburn University at Montgomery, Ala., and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.