The Cold War is back. Or at least, some version of it has returned, with Russian troops on the move across the Crimean Peninsula with the oddsmakers predicting it will once again be Russian territory.

For critics of President Barack Obama, this is a prime opportunity to demonstrate how poorly he stacks up compared with the man who did all he could to topple the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan.

Reagan's son, Michael Reagan, offered this advice for Obama on the Townhall.com website:

"I suggest that President Obama might want to study how Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. He did it without firing a shot, as we know, but he had a super weapon -- oil. Oil was the only thing the Soviets had in the 1980s that anyone in the rest of the world wanted to buy, besides ICBMs and H-bombs, and they weren't for sale. Since selling oil was the source of the Kremlin's wealth, my father got the Saudis to flood the market with cheap oil. Lower oil prices devalued the ruble, causing the USSR to go bankrupt, which led to perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Empire."

It seems like a reasonable narrative, but as we'll see in this fact-check, the record isn't quite as robust as Reagan fils might like.

We made several efforts to reach Reagan for official records that would back up his claim, and we did not hear back.

The basic oil market numbers

We can see what happened with oil markets during Reagan's time in office by looking at volume -- how much was pumped out of the ground -- and price. The U.S. Energy Information Administration provides the production numbers, and what we see partly backs up Reagan's point and partly does not.

more: http://www.sott.net/article/287578-Ronald-Reagans-son-My-father-got-Saudis-to-flood-market-with-cheap-oil-bankrupting-USSR