As you yourself say, there was no Earthly force that could have tumbled the USSR from outside. It was decrepit in many ways, but it was also a vastly powerful m

As you yourself say, there was no Earthly force that could have tumbled the USSR from outside. It was decrepit in many ways, but it was also a vastly powerful militarized nation with a vast territory, plenty of resources still at its disposal and of course, its huge nuclear arsenal. The USA emphatically did not degrade the USSR down and it's not to blame for its collapse either. The idea is absurd and mis-attributes blame, which really lies with the Soviet leadership's own choices in misplaced spending priorities, poorly thought out political strategy changes and finally, a refusal to put economic improvement before political liberalization that was haphazardly applied and escaped their control, with Gorbachev ultimately deciding to simply not pursue the kind of repression that would have put the lid back on. These were internal causes and effects. External factors, such as falling oil prices, had their effects too but those were secondary. U.S. military spending certainly wasn't a any reason for blaming the USA. The idea is absurd, like you going bankrupt because you also wanted the ferrari your much richer neighbor bought, then saying he's at fault because you were too stupid to make more strategic financial choices. Nobody external made the people at Gosplan and in the Central Committee sign off on such poorly planned budgets. The USSR didn't collapse because of bad luck, but it also certainly didn't fall apart as a fault of the Americans. It disintegrated through its leaders' own politically foolish choices. A country that watched this and learned from it was China, and it's still here, under the same essential leadership, more powerful than ever before, despite being in a weaker economic position than the USSR in the mid-1980s. (granted, China shared none of the ethnic and regional nationalist difficulties that had plagued the territory of the Soviet Empire since long before there even was a Soviet Union.