I see no way this could ever backfire!

[Anomalocaris]

It's N/K doing the fighting with equipment from China. That was like the US subsidizing with the taliban with wepons in the mid 80's when they were fighting the USSR. This ultimatly is what broke the back of communism in Russia.

No it wasn't.

America just out spent Russia with vastly expensive schemes that they had no way of competing with. When Gorbachev came in he looked at the financial mess his country was in and called it a day.

Not really. Data does not support this. I think the west suffers from a degree of post cold war trumphalism that encouraged it to distort the narrative to make its own triumph seem more congruant with one's own notion of natural law, and therefore more inevitable and more deserving than it actually was.

When Gorbachev became general secretary of the communist party Soviet Union had indeed lost much the economic and political dynamism it had enjoyed from end of WWII to mid 1960s. But it was still financially solvent. It's geopolitical position was also not bad, in many way better than it was during the helcyon days of world communist expansionism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It's military and military technological position was also not that bad. Soviet Union was behind in some emerging fields of military technology like stealth, and probably getting increasingly further behind, but it had also caught up in some other vital fields like submarine silencing, where the US has long held a huge lead. Furthermore Soviet Union had raced ahead of the US in still other technologies, like space launch, deep sea operation, exploitation of meteological and oceanographical environments. Some of the leads in applied military technology the Soviets built up in the 1980s the US has not matched even to this day. Overall the Soviet Union was certainly still in a position to cut its losses abroad and hold its own in the Cold war when Gorbachev came to the helm.

When Gorbachev ascended to the supreme position he had, by his own admission, never before seen a copy of the Soviet government budget. He didn't seem to know where the Soviet government got vital parts of its annual revenue. He though most of what's wrong with the Soviet Union lies in a sort of moral malaise. He implemented a series of idealistic, but spectacularly ill judged, reforms that drastically curtailed state revenue without any immediate offsets in state expenditures. In his 6 years at the helm the Soviet state went from slight annual budget surplus to several hundred billion rubbles of annual deficit. (at the time a rubble was worth more than a dollar). In a way he was doing to USSR what Ronald reagan was advocating doing to the US. He began the ruination of both Soviet state finances as well as public confidence in the Soviet State. He then coupled his blunders with a dilly dallying style of management in dealing with the consequences of his blunders. As the trouble in Soviet Union mounted, Gorbachev buried his head in the sand, and judged his own successes by the applauses and accolades he is receiving from the west rather than by concrete achievement in improving the actual performances of Soviet society and economy. Ultimately as accolades from the west reached a crescendo, the Soviet Union collapsed around him.

You might say cynically that Gorbachev won the race with Ronald Reagan to see which of them can ruin his country first with deficits, in part because Soviet Economy was much smaller and therefore easier to ruin. Proportionally, Gorbachev cut taxes a lot more than Reagan did.

Why Gorbechev was so incompetent and how it came about that he was put in the supreme leadership position of the Soviet Union is a rather involved and complicated story.

The west tend to want to lionize Gorbachev for causing the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he was not a hero, nor a visionary, nor a believer in the capitalist system or political liberalism in the western style. He was simply a man of modest abilities, excessively high opinion of the abilities he did have, expansive ambitions not rooted in deep thinking, who was in way over his head. He didn't want to end communism. He didn't want to stop the monpoly of power by communist party, he didn't want the Soviet Union to retreat from Eastern Europe. It all happened in defiance of his wishes because he blundered time and again.

If one wishes to examine the current Chinese government for some hints of what sort of prior experiences animates its current policies, one would find "avoiding the mistakes of Gorbachev in any reform" to be the single unifying mentra that runs through all fractions of the Chinese communist party, regardless of whether they are politically liberal or conservative, economically for state control or for free market.