I'll grant for the moment the claim that Reagan's first term defense buildup was important in bringing Gorbachev to the table.

Don't forget, though, that the this very same neocon crowd was absolutely aghast that Reagan and then G.H.W. Bush were willing to cooperate with Gorbachev. They were bitter opponents of the INF treaty (Frank Gaffney, now of Center for Security Policy, resigned in protest from being an Asst Secretary of Something-or-Other at DoD), of the summits, of the troop reductions in Europe, or lowering our nuclear forces' alert status, etc. As late as 1990, Dan Quayle was still arguing that it was all a KGB trick, the Soviets were only pretending to fall apart to lure us into disarming.

Had Reagan not been willing to allow Gorbachev a slow, conditional, and quiet surrender, but instead insisted on punishing terms and humiliating treatment, it's quite possible that there would have been a coup attempt much earlier, and with much more support. Gorbachev kept internal opposition under control for several years by being able to point to results with Washington. Indeed, if we said that we'd only accept the Communists marching out of the Kremlin and handing themselves over to be arrested by a new democratic government, Gorbachev himself would have abandoned his policy and gone back to a harder line.

The "kick 'em in the nuts" strategy recommended by the neocons at the time had a chance, I suppose, of leading to a quick Communist collapse followed by a stable and free regime (i.e., Yeltsin a couple of years earlier), but more likely would have led to either a new hardline government and years of additional Cold War for no added benefit, or a deeper collapse and worse chaos in the former USSR than we got already. Thank God it was Reagan in charge in the late 1980s(*), and not Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, or Jim Woolsey. War isn't always the answer.

(*) Likewise, for "only Nixon to China" reasons, I concede it would have been tough for a Mondale or Dukakis administration to pull off the same diplomacy.