Is this protracted trade war and conflict between the United States and China a test of will, money or systems?

The US is a market economy, where the producers are entrepreneurs with their own capital at risk, while China is a command economy, where the whole country uniformly bears the burden.

Second question: how can the world and the global economy continue to coexist with systemic differences in conflict?

Is it indeed an East versus West, where winners take as much as they can and it’s dog’s meat for the losers?

At least one world leader seems to believe that it is a winner-takes-all, and whoever owns the biggest gun wins.

After the Reagan era, I, like most of the world, began to believe in the idea of having the principle of assured mutual survival that was being ushered in as a better construct than the idea of assured mutual destruction.

Under the umbrella of peace, with less spent on armaments and war, it allows more to be spent on research and development of Earth-sustaining technologies.

Suspicion and the notion of dominance are costly, and the victims are always the people, never the leaders.

The makers of weaponry are the economic beneficiaries of a world in conflict. They support any lobby for war because it benefits their bottom line.

If they can get the governments of the world spending a greater portion of their budgets on defence and purchasing military hardware, less will go towards education, health and human development, and we rob the youth of a future.

The world has come a long ways to now go backwards.

Unfortunately, in just three short years, the paradigm has shifted. Unless this was meant as a glaring, intervening lesson for what not to do, and how not to be.

Not only has the world become more unsafe, but on the very streets of America, people live in fear of the next mass murderer coming out of an emerging pack of white supremacists.

The point here is that while it can be said that there has never been a time of absolute world peace, equally true is that one influential leader with power can produce a ripple effect that can contaminate the entire planet and plunge it into a state of war in every sector.

Not even wildlife and the birds can escape the cumulative effect of bad leadership. The trees, the water and all forms of horticulture are all endangered when there is bad leadership at the top.

This is not just a narrow argument whose focus is on a momentary president, but rather an argument on the whole principle of what leadership needs to be in the 21st century and beyond.

Leaders for our times need not only be ethical, but also humanly and environmentally sensitive. Otherwise, they are not only a danger to civilisation, but to the entire planet.

BermudaFirst has produced a road map in a 200-page document.

It is an aggressive step at looking at where we are and what we need to do to challenge ourselves to move forward.

It crosses boundaries and opens the boxes and cells we have become traditionally trapped into.

Its call to progress, endorsed by the Premier, challenges us to look at ourselves differently, in a more healthy and productive way.

We all need to be part of any progress moving forward.