He continued a policy started by Truman and continued by all other cold war presidents republican or democrat. To give Reagan all the credit for beating the ruskies does all those other presidents injustice. Reagan certainly does deserve a great deal of credit for his arms race policies which exploited soviet economic weakness and ulitmately brought them to their knees economically and politically. I honestly doubt Reagan forsaw that his military build up would cause the collapse of the Soviet Union. From what I remember there was a big shake up at the CIA for not predicting the revolutions in eastern europe in '89 or the breakup of the Soviet Union a couple years later.

It was actually Andropov who began the opening of the Soviet system. He was the head of the KGB I believe and they were the only ones who knew what were lies and what weren't, and he saw the whole system rotting away and heading toward ruin. When Gorby came along he was just aggressively pursuing what Andropov had said was the only way to prevent total collapse.

Btw, I don't think we ever armed the Taliban, although we certainly armed a number of very bad guys over in Afganistan while they were fighting the commies. I personally think the commies weren't as bad as these jihad freaks.