Readers have scolded me gently for too much optimism over the past year, wondering why I refuse to see that the world economy is in dire trouble and that the international order is coming apart at the seams.

And:

So perspective is in order as we look at the world in late 2015. The fateful rupture between the US and China that many feared has not in fact happened. Washington has so far managed the rise of a rival superpower more or less benignly.

China has just been admitted into the governing elite of the Bretton Woods financial system with the backing of the US Treasury. To wide consternation, Barack Obama and Xi Jinping steered through a sweeping climate change accord in Paris, the template for a new G2 condominium.

This is not to deny that the Pacific Rim remains the world's most dangerous fault-line. The South China Sea is on a hair trigger. The US Navy faces the unenviable task of defending the global commons of open shipping lanes without crossing an invisible strategic line.

Yet the Chinese hubris that seemed so alarming four years ago has faded with the dawning realisation that they are not magicians after all - and America is not in decline after all - and that they risk the middle income trap soon enough if they make any further mistakes.

Russia's Vladimir Putin has gained little by overthrowing Europe's post-war order, and seizing a piece of recognized Ukrainian territory by armed force. He has kept Crimea but his attempt to foster revolt in the Donbass through agitators and proxies has fizzled, and in the process he has transformed what was previously a neutral Ukraine into a hostile rampart of the West.

His hopes of dividing the Atlantic alliance have come to nothing. Europe has just renewed sanctions. They are biting deep. The country is shut out of Western capital markets. Unless oil recovers, the Kremlin will have exhausted its reserve fund by 2016, and will face a fiscal crisis by mid-2017.

There are grounds for hoping that the world economy is at last starting to free itself from a low-growth trap. The global savings rate has peaked at 25pc of GDP and seems to be trending down very slowly as China switches to a consumption-led growth model. Or put another way, the underlying imbalance of capital over spending that has bedevilled us for so long is finally correcting.

Icing the cake, we have the net global stimulus of the oil slump. It is a windfall gain in spending power for importers in Asia and the West. Yet the petro-powers are not cutting their spending pari passu: they are running down their wealth funds to prop up their welfare states.

And on the EU:

Output has yet to match its earlier peak in 2008. The overall damage has been worse than the equivalent period from 1929 to 1936. There are still 17.2m unemployed in the eurozone, and the youth jobless rate is still 47.9pc in Greece, 47.7pc in Spain, 39.4pc in Italy, 31.8pc in Portugal and 24.7pc in France.

The underlying deformities of the eurozone have not been corrected. There is still no fiscal union. The tensions will return in the next global downturn. But for now the quadruple stimulus of a cheap euro, cheap oil, quantitative easing and the end of fiscal austerity are all combining in a "perfect positive storm", enough to give the eurozone another cyclical lease of life.

The one great disorder we have in the world right now is the collapse of the century-old Sykes-Picot dispensation in the Middle East, made more combustible by the Sunni-Shia battle for regional mastery.

It is certainly a humanitarian tragedy, but in hard-headed geostrategic terms it is a regional problem, a particular struggle within Islam to come to terms with modernity. It is sui generis and of no universal relevance.

Nor should we overestimate the staying power of the Wahhabi caliphate as it attempts to hold fixed ground against a world now seriously roused in wrath, and without fixed ground, constant infusions of money and the allure of rising momentum, Isis does not add up to much.

Yes, the world is a mess, but it has always been a mess, forever climbing the proverbial wall of political worry even in its halcyon days. So let us drink a new year's toast with a glass at least half full.

David Fuller's view

Here is a PDF of AE-P's column.

There is calm perspective backed by analytical logic in this reassuring column by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.  The last few paragraphs above are particularly worth at least a second, careful read, in my opinion.