More than we may realize, the world has been riding a lucky streak since the global financial meltdown in 2008. How so? The years between 2008 and late 2013 were — relatively speaking — a rather benign period of big power politics and geopolitics. This allowed the major economic powers — the United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia, Brazil and Japan — to focus almost exclusively on economic rehabilitation. But now there are strong indications that our vacation from geo-instability is over.

The last time the world witnessed such a steep and sustained drop in oil prices — from 1986 to 1999 — it had some profound political consequences for oil-dependent states and those who depended on their largess. The Soviet empire collapsed; Iran elected a reformist president; Iraq invaded Kuwait; and Yasir Arafat, having lost his Soviet backer and Arab bankers, recognized Israel — to name but a few. Admittedly, other factors were involved in all these events. But, in each case, steep drops in direct or indirect oil revenues played a big role.

If today’s falloff in oil prices is sustained, we’ll also be in for a lot of surprises. Some will have happy endings. Cuba’s decision to bury the hatchet with America had to have been spurred in part by Havana’s fears of losing some or all of the 100,000 barrels of subsidized oil a day it gets from the now cash-strapped Venezuela. Others could be very destabilizing. Today’s world is much more tightly interconnected and interdependent than in the last oil price drop-off, which was before the spread of the Internet. And today’s world has so many more actors — superpowers and superempowered individuals and hackers who can destabilize companies and countries with cyberweapons. See dictionary for “Sony” and “North Korea.”

When I hear President Vladimir Putin of Russia bragging that lower oil revenues won’t affect the Russian people because they are stoic — look what they tolerated in World War II — my reaction is: “Mr. Putin, that was before there was a significant urban middle class in Russia, one you helped to build with trickle-down oil and gas revenues.” A lot more Russians today have gotten used to traveling abroad, owning a car (note Moscow’s traffic jams), consuming Western goods and seeing how the rest of the world lives. Let’s see how stoic they are today. Russia’s former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin was quoted by The Financial Times on Monday as saying, “There will be a fall in living standards. It will be painful. Protest activity will increase.”