Zell raises some ridiculous points.

Look who's trying to salvage what's left of his ever-diminishing-if-not-downright-nonexistent-credibility. Of course, he does it within the friendly confines of the online-only WSJ Opinion Journal. You know - where they send Peggy Noonan to opine about the sacred dolphins and what-not. This guy's nickname of "zig-zag" really is evident in this piece. Specifically, it's time for people to give up the canard that Reagan's increased defense spending in the 1980s led to the end of the cold war. The West's winning the cold war had less to do with Star Wars the as-yet-untested-and-unviable weapons system, and more to do with Star Wars the Western cultural phenomenon. The Soviet system had been slowly imploding and rotting since WWII, and the trio of corpses - Brezhnev, Andropov & Chernenko - led the Politburo to select Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party - the head of the Soviet State. Gorbachev was no dummy and he saw that the Soviet economic system was crumbling, and that the social system was untenable. This led to Perestroika and Glasnost. These two changes snowballed into the ultimate advent of pluralist democracy and (Tycoon) capitalism. Reagan was along for the ride. Read my lips: The Soviet Union collapsed because of what Gorbachev did - not Reagan.