Aside from putting the world on notice that ocean warming and climate change dramatically have altered our ecosystem, Hurricane Irma put on display the true nature of the wealth of nations.

The southern portion of the United States was severely hit by the storm, which affected more than 40 million people. Right away, in spite of the realities that it will take in excess of $150 billion and a decade or more to rebuild, no one doubts the internal ability of the US Congress to find and allocate the funds and resources to rebuild.

However, that internal means to rebuild will not be available for Tortola, Anguilla, Barbuda and numerous Caribbean islands also devastated by Hurricane Irma. They will not be looking from within or regionally; they will be reaching out towards the northern desk of Britain, America and France for the relief and the means to rebuild.

It makes mathematical sense that little islands with total populations of 23,000 or 15,000, which have hospitals, schools and all the infrastructure to sustain a population as a mini-nation state, do so as a luxury.

As a relative comparison, Cuba, a larger Caribbean island, took the hurricane at its worst for 35 hours as a Category 5 storm and similarly was beaten up badly, but it is expected that they will rebuild. With a population of 11 million, they will have developed the internal means to rebuild, and while it may be fair to assume they may receive some aid, there will be no expectation that they will cry out to either Europe or the Americas for help.

The economy of scale plays its hand in the configuration of global economic affairs. Technology is another important factor. The labour and productiveness of countries are no longer equalised because of their huge disparity in levels of technology and industry.

Today it is unthinkable, whether persons live in Bermuda, the Fiji islands or Europe; they all want a car for transport and they want a motorised tractor to farm their lands. But then we ask who manufactures the cars or the tractors or the washing machines and all the technology right down to a blender to make a milkshake, which sustains our lifestyle? The larger jurisdictions are the producers.

The basic infrastructure to build modern technological commodities is substantive and requires the resource base to bring together all the ingredients for production and a huge distribution network to justify their cost.

Hence global markets are necessary for the furtherance of industry and technology. Technology is the modern replacement of manual labour. The wealth of the world is pegged to technological development. Small jurisdictions are no longer self-sufficient, subsistent economies; they are pegged to larger populations.

Economic co-dependency or interdependency is the natural symptom of our times. It cannot be expected that islands such as Tortola or Anguilla can exist alone without the resource and connection with a major economic jurisdiction. The modern connotation and romanticisation of nationhood is a 19th-century invention that is partly based on the ability to protect citizens within a defined territory.

That principle of protecting one’s citizens, with the merging of global economies, international trade agreements and issues of security, has absolutely diluted the principles upon which nationhood was built and is now an illusion, or at the very least, in need of redefinition. Yes, the issue of identity and national pride is a natural phenomenon that will never disappear and a value worth retaining, but every other aspect of what it means just to exist is dependent on connection with the leading powers.

It will take a new global order enforced with muscle, based on every person on Earth being considered a citizen, to enable smaller jurisdictions to provide the semblance of equality with the kinds of opportunity now affordable only to larger jurisdictions.

This is what the North American Free Trade Agreement and other hemispheric initiatives were heading towards as steps in view of a more equitable globalism. It is a hard lesson to have learnt, but perhaps Donald Trump now understands the value of the Paris Agreement and its global-warming initiative, while the Caribbean simultaneously is learning the value of co-dependency, which Brexiteers will soon discover.

We live in one world and natural forces will assert the need that we actually learn how to act in accordance with that oneness. Globalism has its challenges, but is the only realistic road forward.