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Oh, so Reagan caused the collapse of the world oil market. HAHAHA.

Solidarnosc would not have come off the ground had Pope John Paul II not endorsed it by telling Poles they had nothing to fear. It was after John Paul’s visit that millions joined Solidarnosc.

Cash had no impact on Solidarnosc’s success. Poland was an impetus because, unlike other parts of the USSR, once Solidarnosc was formed, workers united with the intelligentsia. That had never happened anywhere else in the Soviet bloc. Ever. Soviet dissidents were largely failed communists. Only a couple (Bukovsky, for one) were not trying to be “better communists”. They held the working class in contempt. And that is why such a movement was never formed in the USSR. The first person in the USSR to “speak” normally to the working man was Yeltsin.

As for the rest, nobody knew what was “vital” to the Soviet economy. This is a nice theory, but you know what? All those analytics in the CIA and military intelligence were taken completely by surprise by the collapse of the USSR.

What, exactly, does that tell you about American intelligence operations? I can’t blame them - totalitarian states are virtually impossible to infiltrate.

By early 1983, the Treasury Department, under the direction of Casey and Weinberger, had completed a voluminous study of U.S. and Soviet energy costs. The study had discovered that the best price required by the United States for a barrel of crude oil was only $20. This was far below the $34 per barrel being charged in 1983. If oil prices came down, it would save the United States almost $72 million a year, or almost one percent of the gross national product. What would a fall in the oil price do to the Russians?

Very ugly things, it seemed. The study concluded that while a cut in oil prices would boost U.S. economic welfare, the same cut would have a "devastating effect on the Soviet economy," in the words of one former Reagan adviser. In fact, Reagan National Security Adviser Bill Clark told Schweizer that "Ronald Reagan was fully aware that energy exports represented the centerpiece of Moscow's hard-currency earnings." The energy-export industry was working at full capacity. A drop in price, and the Russians were badly lamed.

Soon U.S. officials were huddling in Geneva with the Saudi oil adviser, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani. Following the meeting, the United States announced it was cutting its oil imports from 220,000 barrels per day to 145,000 barrels. In late February, the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, met with senior U.S. officials, including Casey and Weinberger, according to former Reagan officials who were involved.

Abruptly, the Saudis boosted production of oil, resulting in lower world prices. By August 1985, Saudi production jumped from 2 billion barrels a day to 9 billion. Since Saudi Arabia was the swing producer in OPEC, which used its production levels to control the market price of crude, the effect was instantaneous. In Russia, the effect was calamitous...