No­body can know ei­ther the fu­ture course of the new war in the Mid­dle East or its pos­si­ble eco­nom­ic ef­fects. The cur­rent cease­fire is a re­prieve, and Is­rael has turned out to be the desta­bil­is­ing force in the Mid­dle East. Any­thing can hap­pen.

Clos­er to home, we are near­ing the end of Don­ald Trump’s tar­iff pause, and no one knows what will come next. As a small de­vel­op­ing coun­try, we should know that what­ev­er for­eign pol­i­cy route we take, we must en­sure that it pro­motes our coun­try’s best in­ter­ests.

In 1974, well be­fore the reawak­en­ing of Chi­na, then prime min­is­ter Er­ic Williams took the bold step of open­ing diplo­mat­ic re­la­tions with Chi­na.

That ini­tia­tive has served us well, as Chi­na has grown in­to the world’s largest econ­o­my and now dom­i­nates sev­er­al key glob­al sec­tors.

In­dia, like Chi­na, is al­so be­gin­ning to play a larg­er role in world af­fairs. World pow­er is shift­ing away from the West to the East, and as any for­ward-think­ing per­son must know, Trinidad and To­ba­go must al­so fash­ion its en­gage­ment with the world as it shapes its fu­ture. In this con­text, it is im­por­tant to note that Chi­na and In­dia have had the biggest in­flu­ence on the Asian re­gion for the last 2,000 years and to­geth­er ac­count for al­most 40 per cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. Both coun­tries have made the biggest shifts in eco­nom­ic per­for­mance, lift­ing mil­lions out of pover­ty with a sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment in their stan­dard of liv­ing.

Naren­dra Mo­di’s vis­it last week en route to the BRICS meet­ing in Brazil was an im­por­tant op­por­tu­ni­ty, a first step in re­fash­ion­ing our re­la­tion­ship with the world. The pur­pose of the BRICS sum­mit is to strength­en Glob­al South co­op­er­a­tion and ad­vance BRICS part­ner­ships and col­lab­o­ra­tion on glob­al health, trade, in­vest­ment, cli­mate change, ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence gov­er­nance and in­sti­tu­tion­al de­vel­op­ment. The sum­mit aims to pro­mote a more bal­anced and fair sys­tem.

T&T can iden­ti­fy with all of these ob­jec­tives and must de­vel­op all the ca­pa­bil­i­ties to be a part of these de­vel­op­ments. The crit­i­cal is­sue is not mere­ly to say that we want to be part of these de­vel­op­ments, but we must de­vel­op the modal­i­ties that will al­low us to en­gage in mean­ing­ful tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer. Tech­nol­o­gy means a way of do­ing things; this in­cludes the use of ICT. That crit­i­cal step is hu­man and ed­u­ca­tion­al de­vel­op­ment, cre­at­ing the peo­ple re­sources that will give not mere­ly a voice but an ac­tive role.

Like the do­na­tion of vac­cines and the 15 MOUs cov­er­ing health, ed­u­ca­tion, trade, ICT and jus­tice, the 2,000 lap­tops are an im­por­tant tan­gi­ble demon­stra­tion of good­will, and we must be thank­ful for these gifts. But true de­vel­op­ment re­quires much more than these one-offs.

De­vel­op­ment be­gins with the in­di­vid­ual and the im­pact they have on those with­in their sphere of in­flu­ence. This means trans­lat­ing the de­sired skill sets and im­prove­ments in­to a set of stan­dards that be­come com­mon­place and op­er­ate at world stan­dards. It does not come overnight. It re­quires de­ter­mined and fo­cused lead­er­ship, a will­ing cit­i­zen­ry and a sig­nif­i­cant change in ed­u­ca­tion­al stan­dards to achieve the type of growth ex­pe­ri­enced by Chi­na and In­dia. As­so­ci­at­ing with Chi­na and In­dia is help­ful, but the rest is up to us.