The thing is, once businesses get larger than around 20 people, you need access to money and credit in most cases. You are going to have times when you need to cover expenses, make investments and spend money you do not immediately have on hand. In a perfect world this would not seem like sound reasoning, but if your competitor has access to capital and you do not, you will find yourself out of business and closing the doors within a year or two. This is where banks are more predatory than venture capital seems on the surface. VC gives you access to money on more reasonable terms but at the cost of access to intellectual property and the inner workings of the company. Venture capitalists are often called Sharks because they will use this information to exploit any weaknesses and devour the company because each company is just another fish in the sea.

Americans, Chinese, and Russians are not the real problem in the world today and any hate for these is grossly misplaced. Almost all of us are just humans struggling to survive. There are a few tens of thousands of humans that are in control of everything on the planet, and these individuals are the immediate problem.

Unfortunately, the big picture is that venture capital is a trade off. It only really exists because of the exponential growth of silicon technology from the 1950s to now. Prior to the 1950s the world economy was lead by military spending. The exponential growth of silicon is over now. We are presently 10 years away from the last silicon fab node. The actual silicon design process takes 10 years. That means that the people that work on the edge of the science are already at the end. No other technology has ever outpaced military driven growth of an economy. The future will look like the past eras that lead to the Great War, World War 2, and all the conflicts that came before them. You see, you are concerned with what venture capital is doing in the world, but venture capital is no longer relevant. We lived at the end of what some call the Pax-Americana (American peace era devoid of large scale conflict), but in reality it was the Pax-Silicon. Military funding was not capable of keeping up with the growth potential of silicon. In a way, venture capitalists were an extension of the US military. The move that won the cold war against the Soviets was the economic growth that accompanied this move to venture capital with silicon. It is impossible to overstate the big picture importance of silicon, venture capital, and what drives economies.

The thing that matters most right now is actually freedom of information. The power to control information is the pivot point of the next great conflict and it is more important than ever while being the weakest it has ever been in centuries. There is nothing wrong with trying to hurt VC, but you will find it everywhere while it is nearly entirely irrelevant at the brands and location of manufacture. It has nothing to do with the average person in any region of the world.

Generally, I consider something to be dystopian if it is making negative assumptions about the future that are rooted in speculative fiction. These are more like science fiction, fantasy, or geopolitical.

I consider something utopian when it is unrealistic and glossing over aspects that are impossible or poorly premised while presenting them as positive.

An example of dystopian would be the Terminator films or most films and books about AI. These fall into a trope of the machine gods. These are no more than a retelling of a pantheon like mythos of supernatural gods. The issues of future AI are unrelated to this mythos. They are also based on the fallacy of dominance caused extinction. By this logic Earth is a monoculture. These conceptual abstractions are dystopian because they are making stupid handwaving assumptions that result in a dark and grim setting.

Depicting the messiness of reality does not mean a fictional story is either dystopian or utopian.

An example of a utopia is something like a biblical paradise. It is premised on brutal authoritarianism that lacks any objective nuances about the true diversity of life and opinions. It is glossing over the real differences in what people want and expect out of life in an idealized story arc that harms a lot of people. When these people are sidelined as irrelevant, the true underlying dystopian reality comes into view. Utopia is always a story of propaganda-like perfection masking a terror that lies beneath.

One can paint such abstractions on almost any story. These are not really genera even if someone calls them such.

You mentioned your story involves massive geopolitical upheaval. This concept could be painted as dystopian depending on how you write it. Throughout history there were many underlying reasons for changes. Like in the era of Alexander the Great, the conquests of the Macedonians in that age were more due to advances in equipment and a professionally trained army in an era that primarily consisted of less formal city states and small raiding parties. The era of the Romans was mostly the beginnings of broader social cohesion and coalitions of regions. The Great War and WW2 was the era of solidifying global boarders and the role of imperialism. If you are proposing a new era of evolving change, the reason for that change and why that change is a form of evolving progress in a geopolitical sense is important if you would like to abstract a label of utopian or dystopian. Otherwise it sounds like “war fiction” IMO.