"Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down That Wall (that's already collapsing all on its own without my help)!"

I'll let Max Sawicky have the intelligent last word (distinguishing it from Peggy "Loony" Noonan) on the silly notion that Reagan single handedly ended communism in our lifetimes:

This subject has been well-trampled in all sorts of forums, but I want to throw in my two cents. The claim that Reagan toppled communism makes no sense to me.

If you think communism needed an outside push to fall, you implicitly acknowledge that the system in and of itself was functional. The Right likes to say the system was rotten and it needed a push, both at the same time.

There should be little doubt that the system was functional up to a point, but not functional enough from a comparative standpoint. It did not compare well to the West in terms of material standard of living, among other deficiencies.

The notion that Reagan's defense build-up bankrupted the USSR is hard to demonstrate. You could say the build-up implied an ability to block any expansionist impulses, but the one place where such impulses were expressed in the form of overt military force was Afghanistan, where the defense build-up had little relevance. Financing the forerunners of Osama Bin Ladin was cheap. There was no compelling need for the Soviets to pursue such ventures. Soviet activities in Angola were similarly irrelevant to a defense spending contest.