I'd like to borrow a line from my objectivist friends - when your conclusions point to something this unsatisfactory it's time to "check your premises." "Fluke," after all, is merely a term for something you cannot explain. Liberty in Eastern Europe is not a fluke, it was an ideal tenderly preserved through times of outrageous oppression, nurtured carefully by its adherents on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and allowed to flower in the muck that was the chaos of post-Gorbachev Europe. The conditions that led to this chaos were legion, with more causes and actors than will ever be known, much less listed here. But the goal was always there, and reaching it was not by accident.
Reagan deserves credit for inspiration if for nothing else. His principal function was not to spend the Soviet Union into extinction, it was to raise morale and to remind us that the ideals that had been deliberately marginalized and dismissed during the practiced cynicism of the Carter years were, in fact, real, and their proponents sincere, and most of all, that they were attainable. It is that last that socialism and its proponents have never been able to offer, attainability, and they have, by way of compensation, substituted a contrived world-weariness that held that because their ideals were unattainable all ideals were so, that because their ideals were merely buttons to push to manipulate a desired mass reaction, that all ideals were that as well. It was Reagan who reminded us that this was not the case. He meant it, and between us all, East and West, we proved him right.
Very well said and worth posting again, IMNTBHO.