Schrodinger’s Cat and the case for paranoid optimism under Trump 2.0
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The 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.
We’ll have to get used to this ambiguity, which evokes the famous cat in Erwin Schrodinger’s thought experiment (about quantum superposition, if that means something to you). The poor creature sits in a sealed box and is simultaneously alive and dead; but only until you open the box and look. Thereafter it’s either one or the other.
Something similar will happen once Trump takes his oath of office and starts owning every mess in the world. Here are just a few examples in international relations that illustrate how various cats could live or die. They derive from the most important bilateral relationship in the world, the one between the US and China.
If and when these two cooperate, almost any problem becomes solvable. When they don’t, every pickle has the potential to escalate to Armageddon. You may not have noticed this in your social-media stream, but since 2021, the leading killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 has been fentanyl, or some other synthetic opioid based on it.
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