> In the decades since, many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention. In a 1987 speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in a divided Berlin, he told Soviet leaders to “tear down this wall” — and so, we’ve been told, they did.
> This misreading of the actual fall of the wall is, at best, incomplete; at worst, it’s dangerous, contributing to the belief that American leaders can go “from Berlin to Baghdad,” shaping world events while ignoring the complex realities of the locals.
E.g. he resumed food exports to the USSR; I can't find the quote, but I remember something like "we don't use food as a weapon".
The attacks on the USSR were, rhetoric aside, a lot more subtle: bleed it in Afghanistan, deny it hard currency by keeping the price of oil down with the help of the Saudis, and resist and sabotage the export of gas to Western Europe. Further their military bankruptcy, $$$ and capabilities (already in bad shape due to supplying the equipment for 3 complete armored armies to North Vietnam), by continuing Carter's late in the game rearmament program, and make their Strategic Rocket Forces potentially obsolete with SDI (even a partly effective strategic defense negates a counterforce first strike capability). Countering the Soviet's theater nuclear SS-23 deployment. And of course support those in Eastern Europe resisting the occupation.
Or even seemingly small things: ending the Brezhnev Doctrine by taking back the tiny island of Grenada. I've read from many behind the Iron Curtain that that sent shockwaves across it, for it was the first time the US used main force to take back a Communist country. It signaled something important, like Reagan's firm rhetoric.
Diehard Cold Warrior, yes, but a lot more subtle than would "rather start dropping the nukes". He wanted to free those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, not kill them.
As I grew up and gained some perspecitve I have come to see Reagan in a much more favorable light.
I think you're extremely wrong in your character assessment. There are numerous books available on Reagan in relation to what he actually said and wrote about his time as President, none of it indicates he was eager to start a nuclear war.
The soviet union's collapse was inevitable because their government system simply didn't work, and that reality was starting to land on them in the mid-80's when oil prices started to fall as a catalyst.
Of course, a lot can be said for not fucking it up. I'm not trying to minimize it (much) but I don't think it's fair to say the Soviet Union's fall was due in any part to any "strategy" of the west. At best our strategy helped the fall happen a little faster, but it was inevitable.
There were very few people at the time that considered it "inevitable". As late as 1989, that very year, Paul Samuelson, in the introductory university text on economics, still claimed that "[T]he Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and thrive." The conventional wisdom of our ruling class at the time was that the Soviet Union was solid enough that Reagan's material attacks on it were folly, and therefore unjustifiably dangerous.
Coincidental with what? The actual policy change of "Reagan's" that is usually credited for destroying the Soviet Union is the escalated military buildup -- a policy conceived and initiated late in the Carter Administration.
And the actual collapse of the Soviet Union occurred during the first Bush Administration.
In order for there to be even a coincidence, there'd have to be something for this alleged "first and only" status to be coincident with.
A lot of US Presidents did have a hand in bringing it about, from Truman and the Berlin Airlift. without which there wouldn't have been a wall in the first place, to JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner", to of course Reagan.
But in the end it came down to a lot of brave people on the scene. We just helped set the stage. Hmmm, along with Khrushchev and Ulbricht in creating the concrete, so to speak, symbol of the evil empire.