When he took office, the Soviets were on the march everywhere.
Uh, no, they weren't. They were in stagnation, hanging on with oil money.
Afghanistan was a failure for the Soviets not because of any American intervention, but for the same reason it was a failure for the British in the 1870's. The Afghans are a fiercely independent people, fighting in the mountains, where they had the military advantage. Don't know much about the rest of these. In any case, Afghanistan for the Soviets was a sign of weakness, not strength, already when Reagan took office.
When he left, they were on the ropes, begging us to let up the pressure.
No, they were just dying because oil prices had gone down and they poured all their money into weaponry and completely messed up the economy.
And why is it that they were pouring money into weaponry? Oh, that's right, they had to keep pace with the Reagan buildup.
It seems that your whole argument is that the Soviets subsisted almost solely on oil money, and once their oil profits dropped, their whole operation arn afoul. However, from 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power, until 1972 when the Arabs started hiking oil prices, the USSR did just fine. After the oil crunch ended, Soviet oil profits did not disappear, they simply returned to the normal level that had been more than sufficient to keep the USSR a superpower for 55 years between 1917-1972.
My point is that the USSR was stagnating earlier and would have fallen apart after 60 years and not 75 if the oil money did not suddenly mushroom. The Soviet Union was never strong enough to survive indefinitely, but it was strong enough to hang on for some time. This is what my parents taught me, I'm not old enough to remember the USSR's fall. We moved from Russia in 1992, and the perspective from there was that the Soviet Union was crumbling under its own weight, not the US's.
