The terrible legacy of the Reagan years

"In some crude forms of therapy the patient is confronted with a re-enactment of the trauma that caused his collapse. Even so, I don't think I'll be watching Ronald Reagan's state funeral as Margaret Thatcher's taped tribute is played. It'll be too painful. I'll go and sit on broken glass for a while instead. . . .
David Mack, a diplomat who went on the Baghdad mission, is quoted by the author Con Coughlin as recalling that, "We wanted to build a Cairo-Amman-Baghdad axis that would drive (the pro-Soviet) President Assad crazy". Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, complained to the British ambassador that, "We get a far better hearing from the US than from the UK." That sits badly with this week's eulogies.
The Reagan years were the years, perhaps, in which the cold war was won, and that is obviously good. He wasn't the missile-mad cowboy of cartoons, and those of us who thought otherwise were wrong. But the Reagan presidency of 1981-89 was also when the dragon's teeth of the present were sown. Reagan's legacy to the world may be the fallen wall, but it is also the third-world landmine."