[dredmorbius]

Hrm. I'd have to see Pournelle's specifics, though I'm not particularly inclined to find him highly credible. The narrative is interesting.

A few pieces I've been putting together from numerous sources:

1. The USA and USSR were the two dominant oil suppliers of the first half of the 20th century, and are still typically trade off the 2nd & 3rd spots, after Saudi Arabia, today. Oil is much of what made the 20th century. See Daniel Yergin's The Prize (mentioned several times in this thread), and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power -- he notes this in the introduction. The book is an exporation of how energy shaped history.

2. The final collapse of the Soviet Union happened in large part through the oil glut of the late 1980s. The USSR had overextended its domestic committments, had been forced into an unsustainable arms race by the US (which had greater capabilities than the USSR through much of the postwar period, total ground fources excepted).

3. William Ophuls, a little-known author, who combines ecology and political science. In his 1977 book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, he calls much of the subsequent three decades of development, including the fall of the USSR, the industrialisation of China, and the nonindustrialisation (mostly) of India and Africa. Moreover, he gets the dynamics right, a far more crucial element IMO than timing, which is hugely uncertain.

I've found it interesting that command economies (USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, East Germany) often see a very rapid initial growth stage, then a stagnation. One might argue that there are exceptions (Saudi Arabia is essentially a family-government-enterprise-state institution based on oil), and there are market-democratic states that fare poorly. But that quick-launch-early-plateau dynamic seems fairly common.

Appreciate the ref even if I'm taking it skeptically.

[hga]

About to go to bed, but this item:

The final collapse of the Soviet Union happened in large part through the oil glut of the late 1980s.

Is at least claimed to be part of Reagan's economic warfare against the USSR.

Note also that not any one or even two of these things were likely sufficient to bankrupt it, they all piled on particularly in the '80s, and most of it was external and intentional.

[dredmorbius]

Collapse tends to be a process of knocking out of foundations until something ultimately precipitates the rapid chain-reaction of failure.

In the case of energy, there's much in the dynamic and magnitude which offers itself as a principle mode of failure. And yes, it does fit into the "Reagan's economic warfare" mode.

On which, a couple more observations.

1. There are those who claim "economic warfare" isn't, and cannot, be a thing. I have words for such people, which generally aren't welcomed on HN. I also have references to comprehensive policy books on the topic of economic warfare: Yuan-Li Wu, Economic Warfare (1952), http://www.worldcat.org/title/economic-warfare/oclc/330856&r...

2. There are those who claim that trying to defeat other nations through energy policy and markets is absurd. Alex Epstein, a particularly exemplary case of idiot, is one such. The USSR-oil case really seals the argument against his assertion. I've noted this previously elsewhere.