Andreas Kluth, Columnist

The Case For Paranoid Optimism Under Trump 2.0

Memo to Donald Trump and Xi Jinping: When America and China cooperate, people live; when they don’t, people die.

January 2, 2025 at 11:00 AM UTC

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

What a wonderful world.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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The coming year, 2025, is really like any other, only more so: It deserves to be greeted with what one of my former editors calls “paranoid optimism.”

Optimism is in order because the world, chaotic as it currently looks, might get better — and yes, in part because a new American president, Donald Trump, could tackle problems in such mind-bogglingly unorthodox ways that breakthroughs become conceivable. The paranoia is called for because the world is complicated, with dangerous feedback loops hidden inside today’s “polycrisis.” And a leader as proudly unpredictable as Trump might inadvertently blow it all up.