As a former East German, 90% of that "defeat" was done by the USSR (and the Eastern Bloc) itself, not the USA. Credit where it is due, since you insist.

That defeat could have been deferred a long time if it was free to gobble up countries and bring them into the communist sphere.

The USSR collapsed from the inside.

> it defeated the USSR

Very arguably: no, it didn't.

The USSR defeated itself. It overspent and was rife with corruption. They don't call it "the collapse of the USSR" for no reason. It couldn't maintain its own weight and fell in on itself.

Why did the USSR overspend? Was it trying to keep up with the west?

Yes, every empire collapses under its weight, sooner or later.

I agree overall!

The USSR didn't really "overspend" though. The amount of money it was spending on the military was wildly exaggerated by the CIA and other people who wanted more budget.

The issue was the centrally planned economy and the monthly plans where factories would be effective for one week a month and spend the other three turning raw materials into garbage.

In the end, the USSR was simply unable to deliver sufficient goods and services to its citizens.

> Most importantly, it defeated the USSR

I just hurt my eyes from rolling them _so hard._

The USSR collapsed because it was a wildly inefficient system that was unable to provide goods and services to its people.

In order to believe your wild statement you have to believe a lot of huge implausibilities, like the idea that the USSR would not have spent money on their military if not for the Americans, which would literally make them the ONLY empire in history to do that.

Particularly hard to believe is the idea that if Reagan hadn't spent trillions on thoroughly useless weapons, the USSR would have magically flourished.

> Ronald Reagan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals

Americans just love their wildly incompetent and corrupt Presidents, don't they?

It is not at all implausible that competition with the US made the USSR spend more on arms. The reason empires throughout history spend money on arms, as you rightly say, is to compete with their neighbours. The US upped the ante.

I'm not arguing either for or against Reagan. I merely point out that he was right about the USSR.

The USSR suffered a bloody revolution at the turn of the 20th Century which upended its social order. Then tens of millions of its people dies in WW2 and the country was devastated, tens of millions more died of famine or were killed, imprisoned, and/or enslaved by a totalitarian regime which terrorized its people. Much of its intelligencia (the creative lifeblood of any society) were themselves oppressed or exiled.

None of this had anything to do with the United States, but it did contribute greatly to just how broken the USSR was by the time it collapsed. The collapse wasn't only about this, but it certainly wasn't simply a defeat by the US either.