It's a good choice not to include details that could date the book (like happened with 2010). The story acknowledges there are superpowers that have only come together for the purposes of dealing with the immediate crisis and the book discusses about hypotheticals of how the alliances could shatter in the coming years as food becomes scarcer and resources become more difficult to obtain. That's enough for this kind of novel.^ I saw that more as 'don't let the modern-day politics get in the way of telling a good story'. These days it's become so very politically muddled, which tracks with other comments he made in that neither The Martian or Project Hail Mary include politics.

