Disclaimer: While this plan is almost foolproof, there is no guarantee it will work. There are still plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. Attempt at your own risk.

The world is constantly teetering on the brink of total annihilation.

In our fragile post Westphalian world order the constructs of nation states, nuclear warheads, tribal conflicts, and unbalanced leaders threaten to unravel without a moments notice and vaporize us before we get a chance to catch a glimpse of the myriad nuclear explosions that will inevitably bathe the sky in blinding white light.

But this is nothing new.

Humanity has lived under the shadow of its single greatest existential threat for the better part of a century now. I wasn’t around for the Cold War, but my parents used to tell me stories of climbing under desks during drills at school, as if that would somehow matter in the event of a nuclear attack.

Back then it was Reagan and Gorbachev sweating it out over Star Wars and failing to save the world (Reagan is, in fact, single-handedly responsible for the fact that both the U.S. and Russia still have nuclear weapons today).

Now, a new crop of leaders plays the most dangerous game known to man. Trump, Putin, and anyone else at the helm of a nation with nukes holds the power to spark the beginning of the end without a moment’s notice for the other seven and a half billion of us.

Its 2017 and US and Russian jets are buzzing past each other in Syria, the fuse on the powder keg of India and Pakistan continues to burn, and as I sit down to write this article, news breaks that North Korea has achieved its seemingly singular goal of perfecting its intercontinental nuclear capabilities.

Humanity has plateaued at an extreme paradox. Our capacity for innovation has brought us to the point of holding our collective fate in the hands of a few privileged elites with their fingers on the button, yet our broken politics have prevented us from acting collectively in the best interest of everyone.

A global oligarchy prevails while its salespeople pander and pitch faux populism, concentrating resources and allowing over a billion people to go hungry in a world where food is abundant — all because we’ve collectively decided we can’t do anything about it.

The unfortunate state of affairs in the world begs a salient question, one which also holds the key to saving it.

What is politics?

This is the question we need to answer, because the world has clearly forgotten.

Politics, at its core, isn’t a game of negotiating deals between powerful people, it’s not reality TV, and despite what you might learn if you decide to study it in college it’s not some Hobbesian “monopoly on the legitimated use of physical force.”

Those are all over complications. Politics is simple, it’s really only two things: distribution of resources and mediation of conflict.

Of course it’s worth pointing out that as civilization has evolved from Mesopotamia to our modern world, the definitions of both “resources” and “conflict” have expanded a fair amount.

Regardless, this understanding of politics can still be used to describe the history of any and all civilizations, and to solve any problem.

For example, the successive rise and fall of each of the three kingdoms that defined ancient Egypt for over two millennia paralleled extended periods of high and low flooding of the Nile river.

When water was plentiful the kingdoms thrived, storing food, building waterways, and providing the conditions for life to flourish as civilizations grew.

When the floods receded for too long, the economy of each kingdom inevitably collapsed as their key resource dwindled, leading to intermediary periods of disruption and disunity between the Nile Valley in upper Egypt and the marshy delta of lower Egypt.

Similarly, President Obama pushed for and signed legislation that provided more people with a resource they didn’t previously have — healthcare. Now that Republicans are attempting to undo the legislation, their party is falling apart as they find that people are upset by the prospect of losing healthcare.

Understanding politics as one big game of distributing resources and mediating conflict is the key to grasping and solving the most vexing, incontrovertibly impossible problems that face the world today.

For example, on the 241st anniversary of the date that the United States declared independence from British rule, North Korea successfully test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time.

The Washington Post described the test as “a grave milestone,” a euphemism that means it’s time for the news cycle to move on from Trump’s CNN wrestling Tweet and Chris Christie’s beach vacation to the fact that Kim Jong-un now has the power to blow D.C., or any other city for that matter, off the map with the push of a button.

He’s getting comfortable to watch the end of the world.

If politics is going to have the slightest chance of saving us all, maybe this means it’s time to talk to Kim?

Here’s where my plan comes in.