Complex structures, such as states and empires, are always prone to collapse and they usually give little or no previous warnings. The collapse of the Soviet Union, indeed, had not been predicted by anyone and it came completely unexpected. In the present crisis, instead, Western analysts seem to have fallen in the opposite mistake, predicting the rapid demise of the Russian Federation. But that didn’t happen. On the contrary, the Russian economic system showed a remarkable resilience and it strongly rebounded after a bad moment, last year. (image below from Bloomberg).
So, predicting collapses is always very difficult in a world’s situation that looks more and more like a Russian Roulette (an appropriate name in this context), but played with nuclear weapons. It might well be that some states which at present look very solid could be the ones to experience a sudden and unexpected Soviet-style implosion (let me not say which ones these states could be).
Let’s go more in depth in this matter. The collapse of Russia was expected in the West mainly as the result of the recent crash of the world’s oil market. That repeated the situation of the late 1980s, when the old USSR was bankrupted by a similar effect: a rapid fall of oil prices which strongly reduced the revenues from oil exports.
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