On the edge? Global leaders must resist fuelling the fires of chaos

As we approach the Year of the Dragon there is much to concern us says ALLAN PROSSER. But a combination of realism and care will ensure that all is not lost.

US President Joe Biden and China's President President Xi Jinping at the Filoli Estate in Woodside, California in November on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative conference. The odds are increasing that Biden won’t run in this year's US elections at all because of age and infirmity. Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times via AP

In the year before he died the polymathic writer and social commentator, HG Wells, produced a short, and final, book expressing his disillusionment at the direction of the world.

When Mind at the End of Its Tether was published in 1945, Wells, a pacifist and a socialist, had not yet heard news of the atomic bomb, although he had predicted it more than three decades earlier, just as he foresaw aircraft, space travel, television and biological engineering. Three of his other predictions — time machines, cryogenics and alien invasion — have yet to come to fruition, although belief in them has its adherents.