Telegraph: Cheap oil will win new Cold War with Putin - just ask Reagan

Mikhail Gorbachev believes the world is on the brink of a new Cold War. If so, this new clash between East and West will be settled in the same way as the last one, which ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.

However, it wasn’t political ideology, the failure of Mr Gorbachev’s so called “Perestroika” reforms, or the desire of most people behind the iron curtain to own a pair of Levi’s jeans and listen to pop music that saw the Kremlin’s power crumble.

It was the collapse in oil prices engineered by Saudi Arabia, which literally bankrupted the old Soviet Union and ripped up the post-war map of Eastern Europe that had been brutally created in the aftermath of Adolf Hitler’s downfall by the equally ruthless Joseph Stalin.
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