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When Reagan took office, the Soviet Union was 64 years old, nearly eligible, as it were, for Social Security. The rot in its marrow, while still hidden to the outside world and U.S. intelligence, was metastasizing. Reagan's great contribution to the end of the cold war was first understanding that Moscow's cancer was terminal and then working to ensure--through arms control, constrained rhetoric and personal diplomacy--that the end would come about, peacefully but inexorably.
Reagan's instincts, like his rhetoric, evolved over the course of his two terms as the ground began shifting beneath him. After a decade of Presidents carefully talking detente, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and accused its leaders of claiming "the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." To armor such rhetoric, Reagan demanded and got a huge increase in U.S. defense spending. He nearly doubled defense spending during his first term while deploying medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe and battling communists in Central America. He rarely gave ground, and fumbles in foreign policy--like the deaths of 241 Marines on an ill-advised mission to Lebanon in 1983--were eclipsed by sending the troops into Grenada only days later.
In March 1983, Reagan gave a landmark speech calling on the U.S. to build a shield that would render Moscow's nuclear missiles "impotent and obsolete." Whether or not the U.S. could build such a Star Wars shield was less important than the Soviets' knowledge that they themselves never could. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) quickly became an obsession of the Soviet leadership. Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev tried to derail it through propaganda and arms control. But Reagan steadfastly refused to give it up.
Reagan's boosters argue that it took a weapon that never worked to win a war that was never fought. For having failed to kill the program, the Soviets were prodded by SDI into trying to modernize their society--which could only be achieved by liberalization. "I used to think SDI didn't have a great impact," says Lawrence Korb, who was an Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan Administration. "But as I meet former Soviet marshals and talk to them, I'm increasingly convinced it had a major impact. The Soviets feared it could work, and that had a tremendous impact, psychologically, on them."
For all Reagan's foreign policy successes, his final years were overshadowed by scandal. He had become committed to finding a way to free American hostages held in Lebanon. In 1985 his National Security Adviser, Robert (Bud) McFarlane, oversaw a scheme in which Israel, as a stand-in for the U.S., would provide TOW antitank missiles to an Iranian arms dealer in exchange for help in obtaining the release of hostages. Did Reagan, who had repeatedly declared he would make no deals with Iran or terrorists, agree to this one? McFarlane later testified that he did. Reagan said he couldn't remember. After a shipment of missiles (and one hostage released), the Iranians demanded more. Prompted by CIA Director William Casey and by McFarlane's successor, John Poindexter, Reagan signed a "finding" that this otherwise illegal deal was necessary for national security, but he did not inform Congress, as required by law.