Slowly, President Trump is putting together a trade strategy for the US.

It is piecemeal. To some, it is too backward-looking. Nevertheless, the fiery campaigner who once proclaimed the world was driving the United States into third-world status is now building a case for how his America-first policies fit into a global trading system.

“America first does not mean America alone,” Mr. Trump told foreign leaders and business executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Friday. He opened the door to bilateral and even regional trade negotiations with nations in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact he officially killed in the first days of his presidency. “We are also working to reform the global trading system,” he said.

To convince skeptical trading partners, he will have to follow through with policies that illustrate how the US will take a harder line on trade while still respecting the rules-based global trading system it has long championed. And to effectively confront China, whose policies and actions have generated much of the trade tension today, he will have to build a coalition of those trading partners, trade experts say.

“The US will have to have like-minded trading allies by its side,” says Stephen Ezell, vice president of global innovation policy at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington think tank. The US no longer has the economic leverage to single-handedly force Beijing to change its ways, he adds.

Whether a president who has alienated allies from Britain to Africa with tweets and reported comments can create an international coalition remains to be seen.

Earlier in the week at Davos, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel had warned against protectionism and the dangers of unilateral moves in a multilateral trading system.

There are some promising signs on this front. In December, the US, European Union, and Japan issued a strong joint statement saying they would work within the World Trade Organization and other multilateral groups to eliminate unfair competitive conditions caused by subsidies, state-owned enterprises, “forced” technology transfer, and local content requirements. The US has also strongly defended the EU in its trade dispute with China at the WTO.

Some trade experts worry that the administration is still too narrowly focused on preserving current manufacturing jobs rather than engendering the high paying jobs of the future.

“Right now, trade policy looks very rear-view mirror,” says Mary Lovely, an economics professor at Syracuse University. “Just worrying about 500 jobs here or 1,000 jobs there seems to miss the need for long-term strategy.”

On Monday, the administration slapped 30 percent tariffs on imports of solar cells and panels after a glut of them in China caused prices to plummet and forced many US manufacturers out of business.

Big decisions coming

More telling will be upcoming trade cases, involving imports of steel and aluminum as well as a broad investigation into Chinese trading practices. Depending on how the president acts, those cases could be a turning point in how the US engages China on trade, writes Chad Bown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an email.

At Davos, Trump took a direct shot at China without mentioning it by name: “We cannot have free and open trade if some countries exploit the system at the expense of others,” he said. “The US will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair trade policies, including transfer of intellectual property.”

The US investigation into Chinese trading practices – potentially the most far-reaching trade case the administration has on its docket – includes a look into China’s attempt to boost its domestic know-how by forcing foreign companies to transfer their technology to Chinese joint-venture partners.

It’s part of a larger challenge that China poses to the trading system, says Mr. Ezell of the ITIF.

“There’s a whole theory of economic competition at play,” he says. Global trade rules are based on the idea that trade is win-win. If nation A builds a better mousetrap, nation B is better off buying mousetraps from nation A and using its own resources to make things it can make more cheaply than others. But “China has fundamentally rejected the notion of comparative advantage. China wants absolute advantage while having the unfettered ability to sell in global markets.”

An example is China’s national guidelines for its semiconductor industry, in which it specifically calls for halving US semiconductor imports in 10 years and eliminating them entirely within 20.

The issue is not clear-cut. China has made big strides in opening up many industries at the same time that it protects what it views as strategic areas. Since 1992, China’s average trade weighted tariffs have fallen from 40.6 percent to 4.5 percent by 2014, according to ORF, an Indian policy research group based in New Delhi.

Nevertheless, non-tariff barriers are still alive and well, ORF concluded in March. Forcing foreign companies to transfer technology in exchange for permission to invest in the country "is forbidden in China's WTO accession agreement," the group said. "However, it is blatantly followed in China.”

Shared concern on China

"It doesn't matter which trading partner you talk to – be it the Japanese or the US or neighboring countries or European countries,” Michael Clauss, Germany’s ambassador to China, told CNBC that same month. “They all feel the same, that there's a growing protectionism here."

If the Trump administration can harness that global dissatisfaction, it could challenge Beijing, says Professor Lovely of Syracuse. “There are many things that could be assisted by having other like-minded allies in setting rules for trade.”

And the risks of inaction loom large, in part because China has the scale to build up industries from nothing, in part because it uses practices that were never envisioned by the WTO. With cheap loans and other aid to its domestic solar industry, for example, China had grabbed 50 percent of the world market by 2016, up from less than 1 percent in 2001. The US, which invented the technology, now accounts for less than 1 percent.

“One of the areas that causes the most concerns is high tech,” Lovely says. “China is creating its own internet world. It has its own Amazon. Its own Google. There’s nothing in the [trade] rules to deal with that.”

Hector Amezcua/Reuters

Governor Jerry Brown delivers his final State of the State address in Sacramento, California, U.S. January 25, 2018.

California Gov. Jerry Brown wasted no time in his final State of the State address Thursday morning. Clocking in at just under half an hour, the speech dove right into a defense of the governor’s pet projects: grappling with the effects of climate change; the controversial water tunnel he wants to construct under and around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Delta; and the overpriced high-speed rail that he’s dreamed of building since the 1970s.

He closed with a salute to his immigrant forebears, whose persistence, he says, California and its people will mirror “against storms and turmoil, obstacles great and small.”

To some, it was a flat commencement to the four-term governor’s final year in office. Mr. Brown, who’s been a presence in state politics for nigh on 50 years, gave no advice to his would-be successors and outlined no vision for the future of the state’s economy. Even the shout-out to his ancestors wasn’t new: the Los Angeles Times’s John Myers noted Brown had invoked his Gold Rush grandfather in previous speeches.

In other ways, however, the address was typical Brown: direct, confident, practical. He celebrated bipartisanship in the state legislature, telling Republican lawmakers: “Don’t worry, I’ve got your back!” He applauded the GOP senators, none of whom are from California, who voted against their party’s effort to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act late last year. And he delivered the whole thing without a teleprompter.

“He’s authentic,” says Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who specializes in California politics. “He clearly doesn’t care about bells and whistles, and he’s not giving a lot of empty promises and pie-in-the-sky things he can’t do. California will miss that.”

Indeed, the general consensus is that Brown’s legacy – a word the governor resists applying to himself – is one of pragmatic governance. Sure, observers acknowledge, Brown has his moments of madness (see: high-speed rail), and he was lucky to have picked up the governor’s mantle at a time when California was enjoying an economic revival.

But for the past eight years, they say, he’s been the adult in the room, modeling a method of leadership that seems to be seeping out of American politics: one that cares more about keeping the state’s books in the black than toeing the party line. And as partisan forces intensify and California diverges further from Washington, that firm hand – borne from a combination of Brown’s personal philosophy and his decades of experience – could mean a great loss for the state.

“He’s more a problem-solver than an ideologue … [and] he’s exhibited a restraining influence on where California has moved leftward and on what issues,” says Jim Newton, a former L.A. Times journalist who’s working on a biography of Brown. “No matter who wins [the governor’s race], no one is going to have the command over the spectrum that he has, the sense of regard, the sense of fear people have had for him.”

Changing state, and changing governor

The California that Brown, at 36, first inherited in 1975 was far less diverse and far more conservative than the one he came to govern in 2011. The politics of the time were less cohesive and in some ways more radical: an era of cult suicides and mayoral assassinations. Back then, Mr. Newton says, Brown was viewed as an almost kooky idealist who preferred his Plymouth to a limousine and championed solar panels and space exploration at a time when most people’s idea of groundbreaking technology was the video game “Pong.”

The next 30 years saw a tech revolution that pulled Brown’s ideas into the mainstream. Politics also evolved, as both parties began their march to the fringes and a new, more diverse generation began to come of age. By the time Brown, at 72, launched his third bid for governor, California had become a more politically cohesive, liberal state – one that needed a “parental figure” to pull it out of the $27 billion budget deficit the Great Recession had left it in, Newton says. Brown, tempered by four failed attempts at the presidency and stints as mayor of Oakland and state attorney general, had grown into the role.

“They changed almost commensurate to each other,” Newton says. “He’s a more disciplined governor, and the state’s climate demands that.”

Today Brown gets credit from both sides of the aisle for his handling of the budget. He pushed the development of a “rainy-day fund” that would allow the state to weather a mild recession with no major tax increases or budget cuts for years. “He’s always been concerned with the next recession and padding the fund, and he’s to be commended for that,” says Ryan Williams, president of the conservative Claremont Institute.

To the chagrin of many Democrats, he muscled an end to redevelopment agencies early in his third term, calling them out as a breeding ground for corruption (though in 2015 he signed a bill that essentially revived the practice). At the same time he fought for reforms in the state’s criminal justice system, calling for more flexibility around incarceration and rehabilitation – and reversing some of his positions during his first governorship. He's currently working with legislators on policies to better protect Californians in the face of emergencies – a response to the widespread natural disasters the state has faced in previous months.

Above all, he championed climate change, fighting for bipartisan support to extend California’s cap-and-trade program.

“One of the skills he’s brought to the job is a centrist, pragmatic approach to governing,” says state Sen. Steven Glazer (D), who served as Brown’s chief political strategist during the governor’s 2010 campaign. “He’s had the name” – and the weight of experience – “to hold the center course.”

Role of resistance leader

Brown’s pragmatic approach to governance hasn’t stopped him from parading his progressive pedigree at President Trump’s expense. When Mr. Trump announced his plan to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accord, Brown took full ownership of the issue, stepping up to represent the state – and by default the nation – in climate meetings with world leaders. And the more the White House pushes policies and makes pronouncements that the majority of Californians view as contrary to their values, the more Brown takes on the role of leading figure for the resistance.

Critics are quick to note that California – far from being a progressive paradise – faces an affordable housing crisis, a growing homeless population, and soaring poverty levels. If this is the model that progressive politics is offering up, they contend, then perhaps conservatives are right to run for the hills (or Texas, or Las Vegas).

“The current policy trajectory of Sacramento is unsustainable,” Mr. Williams says. “Progressive states like California will continue to fancy themselves as a needed check and the last line of resistance against the Trump administration … and that’s not necessarily healthy.”

But even while Brown, as governor, bears the brunt of these criticisms, many also see him as a kind of anchor against the forces of extremism and partisanship taking over the nation’s political system. His potential successors, qualified though they may be, are more likely to support the state’s leftward march – and have less political capital to spend on fighting the Democratic supermajority even if they weren’t.

Because for all his shortcomings as the state’s chief executive, Brown’s years in office have provided a blend of power and prudence that makes him “a dominant figure in state politics,” says Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Particularly in the last eight years, he was the 800-pound gorilla in the room.”

“The next governor may surprise us all. But the next governor … will not be as politically powerful or as trusted,” Mr. Yaroslavsky adds. “What we’ll lose is a wealth of experience.”

It’s too bad, some say, that Brown didn’t spend much time passing on that wisdom to a new generation of leaders. “Because of his name and power – not in every case but in many cases – he’s been able to advance this more centrist view,” Mr. Glazer says. “I'll be disappointed as he finishes his service that we had not had more help advancing that."

When Elie Smith was growing up in Cameroon’s English-speaking west, he was taught in school that he came from a proudly bilingual country – a British colony and a French colony stitched together in the 1960s to form a new and united nation.

So it came as a shock when he arrived in Douala, the country’s largest city, to take his national high school entrance exam, and found that all the test questions were in French – with no translation. He spoke French, but for his many classmates who didn’t, the exam was a humiliation.

“You just had to guess at what was being said and try your best to answer what you hoped the question was,” remembers Mr. Smith, who now works as a journalist and activist for the rights of Anglophone Cameroonians. But from then on, he says, he saw the idea of a united, bilingual nation as a myth. “There is a reason why Anglophones consider themselves second-class citizens here,” he says.

For decades, Cameroon’s dizzying diversity has been a point of intense pride for the small West African country. “All Africa in one country,” its English-speaking residents boast of the country’s 240-some ethnic groups. “L’Afrique en miniature,” French speakers say, pointing to the country’s mountains and beaches, its deserts and its rainforests.

But since late 2016, that miniature Africa has also played host to a miniature, language-fueled version of an often-violent conflict that has long tested the continent as a whole – over how to bridge gaps of culture and geography in countries mashed together by European colonial powers decades or centuries ago.

In Cameroon, like many countries around it, at the heart of those conflicts is a debate about political power – who has it, who wants it, who deserves it. For decades, many countries in the region have been held together precariously by strongmen who kept the lid on dissent and minority rights. But increasingly, from the Gambia to Togo to Gabon, a new generation of activists are demanding more democratic systems, aiming to better integrate minority groups pushed to the periphery.

“The common thread here is regime fatigue,” says Fonteh Akum, a senior researcher on peace and security in West Africa at the Institute for Security Studies, a South African think tank. “There’s a move across the region to interrogate power and demonstrate in favor of a new version of the state where citizens’ participation is allowed and encouraged.”

Unraveling at the seams

If every happy African democracy is in many ways alike – as Tolstoy would put it – every unhappy autocracy is unhappy in its own way. And in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions, much of that unhappiness is drawn from the kind of experience Smith had as a teenager – a persistent, nagging feeling that the country’s English-speaking minority weren’t the equals of their Francophone countrymen.

That feeling goes back a long way.  

What is today Cameroon was, just over a century ago, Germany’s Kamerun. When the Germans lost their African colonies after World War I, the British and French chopped up the territory between them. Four decades later, at independence, the two halves were messily patched back together – and members of the French-speaking majority quickly took the political reins. Although the government is ostensibly bilingual, language-related tensions have stalked the country ever since.

The Anglais-Francais divide cracked open most recently in the fall of 2016, when lawyers and teachers in the Anglophone regions began protesting the appointment of French speakers in their regions’ schools and courts. By the end of the year, police response to the protests had turned violent – prompting a declaration of secession this October by an entity calling itself Ambazonia, a heavy-handed government crackdown against the demonstrators, and soon, a flood of refugees into neighboring Nigeria.

Last week, UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, announced that at least 10,000 English-speaking Cameroonians had fled across the border. Earlier this month, they warned that the number could climb above 40,000. Several prominent Anglophone activists, meanwhile, have been arrested in recent weeks – including ten currently being held by Nigerian police and Cameroonian-American poet Patrice Nganang, who was detained briefly in December for allegedly threatening the president – and more than two dozen people have died in protests since the beginning of 2017. Several Cameroonian security forces have also been killed by secessionists. The national government, meanwhile, has had the internet in the region almost completely shut off for the last four months.

Fight for recognition

But if language set off this conflict, experts and activists say it ultimately shares a common root with many other African civil conflicts – marginalized minorities trying to fight their way back into political life, after years or decades of alleged second-class status. Cameroon, which is about one-fifth Anglophone, has never had an English-speaking president, minister of finance, or minister of defense. (Of 35 ministers in the current government, one is an Anglophone). And the marginalization of Anglophone regions goes beyond language and culture, residents say, pointing to disparities in public spending between the country’s largely French-speaking East and English-speaking West.

President Paul Biya, born in what was then French Cameroons, has been in power since 1982 – which, after former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s ouster in December 2017, makes Mr. Biya the continent’s second-longest-lasting dictator. In a New Year’s speech last year, the president blamed loss of life on “extremist rioters.”

“Do I need to repeat this?” he asked. “Cameroon is one and indivisible! It shall so remain.”

But Anglophones’ sense of being outsiders has been compounded by the government’s brutal crackdown on activists, says Ilaria Allegrozzi, a researcher with Amnesty International who studies Cameroon. At least 17 people reportedly died in a single day during protests in October, following Ambazonia’s declaration of independence, and more than 500 were arrested.

“If there’s such a heavy-handed response to crisis that could otherwise be addressed through dialogues, through development, through education – that’s just a game that the government will ultimately lose,” she says. “It will only increase the disillusionment of communities and push people to join armed groups [fighting for Anglophone independence].”

For many young Cameroonians, however, the battle is less for independence than recognition, says Smith.

“This conflict is cyclical, but this time there’s been a new element injected into it, which is that we have a president who’s been in power for more than 30 years,” he says. “There’s a feeling that maybe if new leadership comes up, they will be more open to looking at the grievances of Anglophone Cameroonians.”

“I believe that.”

Taylor Luck

Khawla Sheikh (l.), Jordan's first licensed woman plumber, trains women on cutting thermal piping at a workshop in Zarqa, northern Jordan, Jan. 22, 2018.

When life gave Balqees Bani Hani lemons, she decided to repair them.

“I fix cars,” Ms. Bani Hani says as she checks the oil of a car in her newly opened garage in northern Jordan, “and I break stereotypes.”

Jordan’s first commercial female car mechanic is one of hundreds of Jordanian women who in recent years increasingly have taken jobs in traditionally male, vocational trades to make ends meet: welding pipes, fixing transmissions, repairing boilers, and driving taxis.

It is a sign that as prices and unemployment rise in the resource-poor kingdom, some conservative elements in Jordanian society are changing their perceptions of what women can and can’t do, even gradually accepting women working independently in the company of men.

“A high level of unemployment and the threat of poverty is driving many women to take up vocational work under any conditions, and has led many Jordanians to encourage their wives and daughters to do so,” says Ahmad Awad, director of the Amman-based Phenix Center for Economic and Informatics Studies.

“At the end of the day the pocketbook is more important than cultural ‘shame’,” he says.

Rather than simply working against conservative social norms, women workers say they are working with them: They argue that in addition to proving – with some elbow grease – that women are just as talented as men, they are also providing services directly to other women who may be wary of being alone with strange men.

Tired of the lack of job security in the private sector and looking to become her own boss, Bani Hani, a 34-year-old single mother of two, decided in 2016 that she should open up her own small business. But when she looked at the conventional opportunities open to her, she was unimpressed.

“Everyone told me to open yet another beauty salon or tailor, as if all women could do is straighten hair, paint nails, and sew,” Bani Hani says from her Zahreh Garage in her home town of Irbid, 60 miles north of the capital, Amman.

Taylor Luck

Balqees Bani Hani checks the life of a car battery at her newly-opened Zahreh Garage in Irbid, northern Jordan, Jan. 21, 2018.

She says she found inspiration when she had to get her car repaired and was forced to deal with patronizing male mechanics and spend hours driving around an industrial zone looking for parts she had never heard of.

“I hate the idea of women left at the mercy of men,” Bani Hani says of the car-repair industry and the wider business world. “I believe all women, no matter their nationality or origin, would agree.”

She decided to fix cars.

Gaining men's trust

After spending six months apprenticing at a garage, Bani Hani took a $14,000 loan from the government’s Development and Employment Fund to rent, renovate, and open Jordan’s first ever “women’s garage,” servicing and repairing cars for women by women. Future female employees are in training.

Although her business model is eventually to exclusively serve women, initial overhead costs in her first month have meant Bani Hani has had to provide service to male customers to get her project off the ground.

And the men have come around to the idea of a woman working under the hood of their car.

“Jordanian society is conservative, but when we see a woman working hard to stand on her own two feet, we want to support them,” says Ahmed Hassan, a 56-year-old former owner of a fleet of trucks, as he waits for Bani Hani to replace the brake pads on his 1994 Toyota Camry.

Khawla Sheikh has also helped blaze the path for Jordan’s workwomen. 

A former housewife, Sheikh decided to train as a plumber in 2004 to serve women and later teach women home repair. 

Encouraged by the enthusiastic response among her trainees, in 2011 she formed Jordan’s first women’s plumbing company, Plumbing and Energy Cooperative Society, comprising 16 women from across the country who repair and maintain water systems and piping. At first, she says, people laughed at them, and sometimes her plumbers would literally have clients close their doors on them, unwilling to trust the handiwork of women.

Now, there are dozens of women plumbers across the country.

“These women now don’t have to face the resistance I faced 10 years ago, and in 10 years’ time it will be even easier for the next generation,” Sheikh says on the sidelines of her advanced-level course in plumbing and repair for women.

Steep path to workforce

Despite being highly educated – more women graduate from Jordanian universities than do men, year in and year out – only 22 percent of women in Jordan participate in the workforce, compared with 87 percent of Jordanian men, one of the lowest rates in the region, according to the World Bank. This is despite a population that is 49.7 percent female. Unemployment among Jordanian women is around 33 percent, more than double than that of men’s 13.9 percent.

Economists, analysts, and women workers attribute this low participation to a combination of cultural misconceptions and practical barriers.

Some conservative and tribal families, although they encourage their daughters to continue their higher education, find the thought of women being alone with strange men, working long hours, or having to take public transportation to be “shameful”.  

Meanwhile, a lack of transportation, day care for children, and social security make many jobs more trouble than the salary is worth.

Women’s path to the workforce has been steep in Jordan, where traditionally the only acceptable work for women was as school teachers, and later professors, government clerks, nurses, doctors, and secretaries.

Now that times are tougher, hundreds of Jordanian women are taking up vocational trades, becoming plumbers, car mechanics, taxi drivers, electricians, and gas station attendants.

Women are also motivated by the pay. One day cleaning water tanks can earn a worker 90 Jordanian dinars, or $126, more than one-third the monthly minimum wage in Jordan. Good days as a plumber can bring in excess of $170, the amount of monthly rent, a mortgage payment, or university tuition fee. A busy day at the garage can generate upwards of $100, equivalent to two weeks’ worth of groceries.

Thousands in training

Jordan’s iron women are quickly passing on their craft to thousands of eager women.

Bani Hani is selecting women engineering graduates to train at her garage as car mechanics, later to be appointed as her first full-time employees.

For a decade, Sheikh has provided plumbing and home maintenance training to women, and now provides advanced courses – complete with her own textbooks – funded by the German government and the United States Agency for International Development. Since 2007, Sheikh has trained 16,000 women across Jordan, many of whom are now starting their own companies and cooperatives.

At Sheikh’s training workshop in the town of Zarqa, women trainees chisel away at cinderblock to lay pipes. Others cut and shape thermal pipes, or design their own blueprints for a planned bathroom.

“People have seen our work and are now trusting us,” says Saeda Hamdan, a 54-year-old mother of five who after freelancing as a plumber is now planning to open her own company to clean water tanks, which all Jordanian households rely on. “Now we are going into homes and fixing the mistakes of men plumbers.”

Regulatory obstacles

Despite a shift in perceptions of women’s place in the workforce, practical barriers remain: women-owned businesses face all the regulatory obstacles that men’s businesses do.

While the country has strived to create an investment-friendly climate for foreign investors, Jordan’s bureaucracy, arcane regulations, licensing, and heavy taxes at the local level stifle many homegrown small- and medium-size enterprises before they even get off the ground.

Bani Hani spent thousands of dollars in licensing fees before opening her garage, while aspiring plumbers are often forced to work informally.

Meanwhile, the conditions that have long dissuaded Jordanian women from entering the private sector remain: expensive or unavailable health insurance, a lack of nurseries to place their children, and costly transportation.

“The cultural ‘shame’ preventing women to enter these sectors is gone, but the support to keep them there and protect them are still not in place,” says Mr. Awad.

Still, Jordan’s tradeswomen vow to plow on.

“A hard day’s work has no gender, only results,” says Hamdan, the trainee plumber. “No one can take that from us.”

Courtesy of Patrick Daly

Jonathan Demers (with puck), an Army guardsman, joined the New England Eagles Veterans Hockey Club two years ago.

On a Saturday evening in the Boston suburb of Bedford, Mass., a small crowd is gathered to watch the New England Eagles Veterans Hockey Club take on the MA Hockey League Saints.

Both teams are mixed-level, made up of adult players who come together to compete and have fun on the ice. But for the Eagles, there’s a larger goal. Dressed head to toe in red, white, and blue, these military veterans and current service members skate to raise awareness of the suicide rate among veterans.

In recent years, this rate was about 22 deaths per day, according to estimates by the US Department of Veteran Affairs. It’s a number that many – including Bobby Colliton, an Army and Air Force veteran from Spokane, Wash. – find unacceptable.

After his own experiences transitioning back to civilian life in 2015, Mr. Colliton understands the struggles of veterans as they leave the military today. “I was isolated,” he says. But hockey, he adds, was “the only thing I had that made life good.”

Colliton started playing the sport with a recreational team in Florida shortly after leaving the military. It wasn’t long before he decided to take his love of hockey a step further: In 2015, he founded the Skate for the 22 Foundation to draw attention to the suicide rate and provide a space for veterans to come together and support each other. Among the foundation’s initiatives is the coed hockey team, the Eagles.

“I wanted to give a place for these guys never to feel alone again,” says Colliton, who himself has lost four friends to suicide.

The Eagles team, which was founded in November 2015, started with 18 veterans who played their first game against the Boston Fire Hockey Club. Since then, the foundation and the team have grown to more than 210 members. In fact, demand has been so great throughout New England that this past October a second team was formed – the Granite State Cannons – to serve the New Hampshire veteran community.

“Our growth rate is a testament, I think, to what we’re doing on the ice,” Colliton says. He considers hockey the best sport in the world because of its team mentality and the work ethic it demands from players.

While many come to the Eagles already knowing how to skate and play hockey, the team is open to any current or former service member, even if he or she has never been on the ice. New players can take part in learn-to-skate and learn-to-play skills clinics.

The Eagles have a regular season each year for practices and games, plus skills clinics for players of all levels and family skate events to help connect with the community. The most valuable part of it all, players say, is the camaraderie.

‘People get it’

“Within the military, especially active duty ... there’s definitely a mentality of brotherhood that is developed, mutual respect.... I really missed that when I retired from the Army,” says John Dorman, a former lieutenant colonel who plays goalie for the Eagles. When he joined the team, he was glad to be back around people with a similar background. “You can speak in your acronyms, and make your stupid military jokes and stuff. People get it,” he says.

For Lindsay Migala, an Air Force reservist who plays right wing for the Eagles, the team and players became “the family you never knew you had” – within the first year of her playing on the team.

Players who live near each other often get together outside of practices and games to grab a drink or do other things. The off-ice connections have even resulted in new job opportunities for some veterans who were recommended for a position by a teammate.

Although the foundation always recommends seeking help from mental health professionals, it also recognizes that community support for each and every veteran is a good way to help reduce suicide rates.

And the New England hockey community has answered the call for support. Professional players, coaches, and referees volunteer at the clinics, practices, and games; hockey rinks donate ice time and equipment; and National Hockey League teams such as the Boston Bruins have backed the Eagles with free tickets to NHL games and a chance to play charity matches before and after Bruins games.

One of the Eagles’ regular coaching volunteers is Chris Dyment, a former American Hockey League player with teams including the Providence Bruins, where he served as assistant captain. He is now a coach for the junior Islanders Hockey Club in the area and donates his time to Skate for the 22 to help new players get up to speed.

Going out of his way

The team atmosphere of lending a hand and welcoming everyone, no matter what skill level or background, comes from Colliton at the top of the foundation, says Jonathan Demers, an Army guardsman who joined the Eagles two years ago. “[Colliton] just really goes out of his way to help people in any way he can, even outside the organization. It doesn’t even have to do with hockey,” he says.

Mr. Dorman, the Eagles goalie, also pays tribute to Skate for the 22’s leader. From making sure female players feel welcome in the male-dominated group to answering calls from veterans day and night, Colliton has developed a foundation “that has made a difference in a lot of people’s lives,” Dorman says.

For Colliton, what has been most rewarding is seeing the foundation grow and witnessing the changes in players. Although some veterans come in unsure about the foundation and the Eagles, that is quickly turned around.

“You’ll see smiles; you’ll see laughter. You see guys, you know they’re fighting hard; they’re getting into it. They want to win,” Colliton says. “You’ll see determination on the ice.... The best way to put it is pride. They have pride.”

That pride and love for the Eagles and its mission have helped the operation grow. “These guys playing the games are what raises the money. They keep the program going. These guys are out there raising awareness in their own communities of the veteran suicide epidemic,” says Colliton, who notes that Skate for the 22 provides assistance to families of veterans who do commit suicide.

The work of the foundation has touched a lot of lives, but Colliton says more work needs to be done. “I want to go out of business; I want to be down to zero” veteran suicides, he says. “I want to have to pay for hockey again.”

• For more, visit skateforthe22.org.

Retuers

A former train station in Paris has been converted into "Station F," a place for startups, multinationals and investors to start new businesses.

Not many world leaders would pitch the virtue of humility as a strategic asset for their country’s competitiveness. Yet that is what French President Emmanuel Macron did this week at a gathering of the global elite in Davos, Switzerland. He claimed his reforms since being elected last year are helping the French – especially its rising number of entrepreneurs – to learn from mistakes in business.

“In France, it was forbidden to fail and forbidden to succeed,” he said at the World Economic Forum. “Now it should be more easy to fail, to take risk.”

Mr. Macron seeks to create “breakthrough innovation” in France that will help the country to produce more world-class technologies. But he realizes this will take a “cultural change.” France has a long tradition of people relying on workplace stability and the state. He said too many workers still fear globalization.

One solution for such fear lies in humility, or a willingness to recover from trials and errors. As French statesman Georges Clemenceau once said: “Life gets interesting if you fail because it means we’ve surpassed ourselves.”

Macron has pledged money to retrain workers and provide more venture capital – which will balance new labor reforms. He has given more freedom for schools to experiment in ways that would teach critical thinking.

He also seeks to link up French entrepreneurs with other hotbeds of innovation, such as California’s Silicon Valley and China. And he has proposed an “innovation agency” for the European Union to rival the Pentagon’s research agency.

Macron represents the latest model of what is called “failure-tolerant” leadership. Such leaders must show humility and compassion in allowing people to learn from dead-end experiments in order to come up with better concepts for success.

In electing Macron, the French showed they were willing for a shift in thinking. His new political party defeated the country’s two well-established parties in the 2017 elections.

He now dubs France as a “start-up nation.” But he says that with some humility – just in case some of his reforms fail.