Congratulations, 2014! You could’ve been a lot worse.

◼ In the United States, political and racial polarization seemed especially deep, and across the globe things got pretty scary. - Daniel W. Drezner/Washington Post

Russia annexed Crimea and sent its forces into eastern Ukraine in an effort to undermine the new Western-oriented government in Kiev. In the Middle East, the Islamic State displaced al-Qaeda as the region’s bad guy. The euro-zone economies stagnated, even compared with how they performed in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Ebola terrorized Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and threatened many more countries. As the year closed, two cops in Brooklyn were fatally shot at point-blank range, and the Pakistani Taliban committed a heinous massacre of schoolchildren in Peshawar. And to top it all off, a boy dictator in Pyongyang even threatened to prevent the rest of us from weakly laughing at Seth Rogen.

It’s not that there was no positive news — the fall in global energy prices put more money in people’s pockets, and crime continued to decline in the United States. Still, the bad seemed to crowd out the good.

But what if 2014 turned out better than expected? Thinking about what actually happened this past year may not be the best way to judge it. After all, an awful lot of smart people predicted a lot of even-more-terrible things that never came to pass. And these averted catastrophes point toward some interesting ways to think about 2015.

Perhaps the most important nonevent of 2014 was that war did not break out in the Pacific Rim. This was far from guaranteed at the beginning of the year....

So yes, a lot of the predicted bad stuff didn’t materialize in 2014, but that might feel like a low bar. Are these nonevents enough reason to be optimistic for 2015?

This depends entirely on whether one believes that resiliency is an exhaustible or a sustainable resource. If you think that our national and global reserves have been used up averting one disaster after another these past 12 months, then 2014 is simply a harbinger of doom. Maybe 2015 will be the year when the system finally cracks....