Gene Wolfe, from SF writers’ 1987 time-capsule predictions for 2012

The Thumb—Power: America and the U.S.S.R. preserve an uneasy accord, each testing the other’s will within well-defined limits. No major nuclear war has taken place. Soviets are more like Americans (and Americans more like Soviets) than anyone else.

–read the rest here; Tim Powers’s answer sounds eerily like the kind of thing my grandfather would have written! Link is probably via Jesse Walker. And I made the case in that final sentence here!