Still, one old techno-thriller has been coming to mind every so often lately as having displayed a bit more insight than the rest--Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's Cauldron (1993).
Published back in the early '90s, when the world economy was looking sluggish, and neo-mercantilist competition between North America, some sort of European bloc and Japan looked like the new order of things, Bond and Larkin pictured exactly this happening. Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way under rightist and none-too-democratic leaders precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis contributes to far right backlash, not least in those East European satellites, with Hungary an early critical flashpoint.
Ultimately there is a revolt against the government that prompts aggressive military intervention by French forces to suppress the threat to its client regime that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and soon invading those nations outright to keep them under Franco-German ("European Confederation," or Eurcon) control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop the aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .
The aggressiveness of a scenario in which the mid-1990s saw the U.S. at war with its recent European allies was, of course, a stretch by even techno-thriller standards (the kind of stretch that, I think, contributed to the decline in the genre's popularity). Still, the interaction between economic downturn and decay of the post-World War II trading system, the hints of a shaky and even fragmenting Western alliance, dissent in smaller nations confronted with German/EU diktat, the refugee crisis, the far right backlash, instability and authoritarianism in Hungary, France, and elsewhere in Europe, the resurgent possibility of armed conflict between the U.S. and Russia--all of this, wrongly anticipated as events of the '90s, could well have been "ripped from the headlines" of the late 2010s and 2020s. And as all this hints, if Bond and Larkin's book could seem merely one of a host of novels at the time envisioning some kind of clash between the U.S. and a Germany intent on mastery in Europe, Bond and Larkin, as was usually the case with their work, put rather more thought into the political their premise, and devoted more time and space to the development of the conflict on the way to the outbreak of their fighting, than any of their colleagues--and as is often the case when an extrapolation of this kind did not quite come to pass, it still offers the reader something to think about long after it has dated in the narrower ways.
Indeed, Bond and Larkin displayed sufficient sophistication that one might wonder if they did not look at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism." However, if one might see something of the left's insights into this story of capitalist governments resorting to the final argument of kings in their competition for markets, no reasonable observer could mistake the Bond-Larkin scenario for a leftist one. Europe's working classes, especially as represented by trade unionists, come off as racist reactionaries, and the story is, in the end, a flag-waving, free-trading argument for the dynamic duo of "McDonald's and McDonnell-Douglas" as the world's best hope for prosperity, peace and progress--very much in line with what, in hindsight, shortly proved to be the conventional wisdom of their era.
Given how that outlook has suffered since the 2007 crisis I wonder if writers treating a comparable theme would imagine the same sort of ending today.
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