Republicans greatest praise of Ronald Reagan is that he ended the Cold War.

[rrneck]

5. The claim is that he made them spend themselves into bankruptcy.

The arms race might have been a factor, but other factors like their little excursion into Afghanistan and the general inefficiency of the totalitarian government and Communist economic system garners the bulk of the blame.

ETA Here's an interesting book.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
A drunkard's walk is a type of random statistical distribution with important applications in scientific studies ranging from biology to astronomy. Mlodinow, a visiting lecturer at Caltech and coauthor with Stephen Hawking of A Briefer History of Time, leads readers on a walk through the hills and valleys of randomness and how it directs our lives more than we realize. Mlodinow introduces important historical figures such as Bernoulli, Laplace and Pascal, emphasizing their ideas rather than their tumultuous private lives. Mlodinow defines such tricky concepts as regression to the mean and the law of large numbers, which should help readers as they navigate the daily deluge of election polls and new studies on how to live to 100.

Mlodinow makes the point several times that luck has much more to do with success than we realize or care to admit. Reagan was in the right place at the right time.