I don't think a significant number of people actually think Reagan was responsible for the wall coming down. I think the article projects that opinion onto the populace as a straw man to make its point work.
Presidents (mostly rightly) get the credit or blame for what happens on their watch. Reagan was not there opening the gate on that night, no, but his policies and strategy to bring an end to the Soviet Union made it possible for that to happen.
I think the best thing Reagan did was not fuck it up.
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.
You believe it's essentially coincidental that Reagan was the first and only President to have the goal of ending the Soviet Union, not "containing" it? Or as I've noted elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=8577120) that the oil price fall just happened?
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.
> You believe it's essentially coincidental that Reagan was the first and only President to have the goal of ending the Soviet Union, not "containing" it?
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.
