There are a lot of conflict spots in our world.  Some of them have been going on for weeks, while others have endured for years or decades.

I have a half-baked, overly simplified, complicated plan to end them all.  In six months.

First, the United Nations proposes and passes this plan, which may be the most difficult (and meta) step of the entire process.  Ideally I would need a Security Council resolution, and finding that unanimity among some countries that would be subject to said plan would be challenging.

But let’s assume for the sake of thinking this all out that everyone agrees to move forward.

We declare that six months from now there will be a global peace conference to resolve all conflicts involving two or more nations, or civil ones.  Each side then has those six months to present their proposed solution, which then must be approved by a simple majority of the U.N. General Assembly to ensure it’s not a crazy idea.  Propose something too radical and it gets rejected, and you have one more chance to come back with something more sane.  Fail again, and the General Assembly votes to knock off whichever portion they still don’t like, and that’s your side’s plan.

In addition to each party to each conflict, the peace conference also has a set of wild card nations.  These countries will be chosen so that somewhere in the room, we have a few friendly, neutral-ish and not so friendly countries for each party.

From there, it’s really simple.  We put a conflict up on the board — say Israel and the Palestinians — then fire up our lottery style ping pong ball machine.  Inside there are countries like the United States, Iran, Brazil, Britain and a few others.  Someone flicks the switch, and whichever ball pops up, that country gets to pick how to resolve that fight.  It may be an ally of one side or another, or one with no dog in the fight.  But of course they only get to pick either the Israeli plan or the Palestinian plan, each of which has been given “not crazy” approval by the General Assembly.  So at the end of the day, yes we’ll have some people who are mad they didn’t win, but they won’t be completely crushed as a result.

My coworker is concerned that the six month period gives certain parties in armed conflicts a nearly six-month window in which to militarily end things in potentially devastating fashion.  My solution here is to say that once six month clock starts, any attempt to do that triggers massive sanctions against the offenders, and other potential measures as decided by a two-thirds majority of the Security Council.  Same goes for “losers” who do not abide by the results of the peace conference.

Would this ever work in reality?  Probably not.  Okay, no.  But maybe it would at least get everyone to sit down for a few minutes and decide what we all really want, while also considering what would be fair enough to the other side in order to get approval.  Wouldn’t that be a good start?

Now let’s go back to watching llama escape videos.