If the North Korean state media was all you had to go on, you would conclude that East Asia was right now an extremely dangerous place to be. “War exercises ... strategic bomber corps ... grave situation ... war maniacs ... we will retaliate ... prompt counter strikes” – and all this in just one dispatch from the Korean Central New Agency.

North Korea is preparing to test fire an intercontinental ballistic missile it insists is a peaceful space rocket. Japan is threatening to blast any such missile out of the sky. The United States and South Korea conduct a massive military exercise. It sounds like the countdown to an appalling confrontation, to a repeat of the 1950-53 Korean War, which killed millions and sucked in armies from across the world. So why do the people elected to worry about these things, from Barack Obama to Gordon Brown, not seem especially alarmed?

It is true that Korea has the potential, at very short notice, to descend into the nastiest war since Vietnam. A million North Korean soldiers (ill-equipped, but fanatical) face 680,000 South Koreans and 26,000 Americans (well trained and superbly armed) across a mile of landmines and barbed wire. North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, suffered a stroke last year and has still not formally named a successor. If he died suddenly, he would leave a power vacuum in a state that has already tested a nuclear device.

It is the stuff of nightmares but this is the way it has been for years. Nothing done or said in the past few weeks changes the rather simple fundamentals on the North Korean peninsula – or the one scenario that could lead to its resolution.

North Korea will, at some point, fire its satellite rocket/missile and the world will be duly appalled. But, barring an unlikely misfiring, the rocket will splash down harmlessly in the Pacific and everything will be much as it was before.

We have known for years that North Korea has long-range missiles. It has fired them twice before, with the last test preceded by exactly the kind of drum roll of apprehension we are seeing now. To use them in anger against another country, however, would be suicidal.

There is no military solution in Korea – for either side. Kim Jong Il knows that any first strike (even a significant act of terrorism) would be met with retaliation of such scale that his power would be destroyed within days or even hours. For the US and South Korea, the task of fully subduing and bringing democracy to a country as complicated as the North, particularly at a time of worldwide recession, is unthinkable – politically and financially. This is why George Bush’s moral censoriousness of North Korea in his first term achieved so little: it was fine to dislike Kim Jong Il but mere distaste did not change the status quo.

Missile or satellite, soothing words or overheated rhetoric, the last few years have demonstrated what should have been obvious from the beginning: that the only way to disarm North Korea and bring its oppressed people into some kind of constructive relationship with the rest of the world is through dialogue and negotiation. Such an effort is ongoing In the form of the on-and-off “Six Party Talks” hosted by China, and since the US swallowed its pride and began to talk one-to-one with the North, these have made slow, but measurable, progress.

The progress, and the pride-swallowing, will, eventually continue – not because they are easy, but because there is no alternative. Now, as before, the most alarming thing we face in Kim Jong Il is not his rockets and soldiers, but the necessity of compromising with him, and with ourselves.

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