Somewhat surprisingly for a leftish Scot I am a fan of Reagan - for one very important reason. He understood that the standard US view of the Soviets was actually wrong and it was the Soviet leadership who were utterly afraid of the US (perhaps for good reasons) and he changed his approach.
It wasn’t widely realized at the time even at high levels of the US government, but the USSR collapsed under its own economic weight, and was in demographic free-fall before Reagan ever took office. It’s unlikely that any action the Reagan administration took had a significant effect on the end result, though arguably US policies might have accelerated or retarded the decline by a couple years.
The Soviet's might have been broke in the 1980s but they were armed to the teeth and I do think that the change from "evil empire" rhetoric to actually engaging with their new leadership probably reduced the risks of an all-out war which few of us would have survived - certainly not here in the UK.
