I recently watched a talk by Lord Powell, Thatcher's foreign policy adviser, and he said that the Cold War was won because Thatcher and Reagan decided to go on the offensive. Obviously this is nothing new to the debate, but I was wondering whether other causes such as the impact of Gorbachev are equally or more valid reasons for the Cold War ending.
The Cold War was (simply put) never won, it as doomed for the Soviets from the start. What many people forget when analyzing the whole thing is, that the USSR got out of WWII a bunch of war-torn land with decimated population, heavily damaged or outright non-existent infrastructure to add to their own... decimated population and damaged or non-existent infrastructure. The West lost way less in both areas.
USSR also gained a lot of not-so-keen-to-be-communist countries (mostly from the remnants of the post WWI partitioning of the Hapsburg Empire) and quickly got in to problems with the only other big communist power in the world (China).
And than it tried to be compatible in every way with the West. And we all know how that ended.
Thatcher and Reagan didn't do anything, that a good politician wouldn't - they used every opportunity to get a quick stab at an already dying beast.
While nukes prevented a total war between both parties, the image of much better standard of living, and perceived freedom of thought helped more to bring down the Soviets, than any one person.