There's been no shortage of e-mails from readers about the closing words in my recent WorldNetDaily column: "In 1981, the United States was widely viewed as a superpower in decline, one that had watched nine countries fall into the Soviet orbit in the previous seven years. By 1991, the Soviet Union was gone. But that's another story."

Dean's feedback is representative: "Are you planning to do a follow-up about the Soviet Union?" I wasn't, but since I support the view that says production is best when it's market-driven, here goes.

Let's start with a quick look at what it was like in the early 1980s, illustrated by a recent conversation I had with Dinesh D'Souza, a senior policy analyst at the Reagan White House. Much of the American "intelligentsia," he said, saw Reagan as "not too smart" and a Soviet Union that was firmly in the pink -- strong, productive and undying.

It was the "wise men" versus "the dummy," as D'Souza so adeptly documents in his Reagan biography. In 1981 at the University of Notre Dame, for instance, Reagan told students and faculty that communism would be dismissed as "some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written." At around the same time, distinguished Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University was painting an altogether different picture in the pages of the influential journal, Foreign Affairs. "The Soviet Union," he asserted, "is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true systemic crisis."

It was the same in 1982 with Reagan telling the British Parliament that the "march of freedom" would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history." At Princeton, eminent Sovietologist Stephen Cohen said Reagan was suffering from "a potentially fatal form of Sovietophobia."

Midway in the Reagan presidency, in 1984, renowned Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith was telling the world about a Soviet system that enjoyed "great material progress in recent years." In short order, Nobel laureate and MIT economist Paul Samuelson was buttressing that rosy scenario in the 1985 edition of his widely used textbook, applauding the track record of central planning and Kremlin economics: "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth."

And as late as 1989, just two years before the Soviet system went in the tank, celebrated MIT economics professor Lester Thurow was trumpeting the "remarkable performance" of the Soviet Union: "Today it is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."

The "wise men," in short, had it wrong. Explained Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in the aftermath of the Soviet disintegration: "No one foresaw these changes."

Well, not quite. "The 'dummy' foresaw them," says D'Souza.

But more than that, the real question is whether the "amiable dunce," as Reagan was called by Clark Clifford, defense secretary under Lyndon Johnson, was simply a lucky bystander and first-rate forecaster or whether he put together a plan of action that sped up and assured the downfall of one of history's largest empires.

The answer, says Peter Schweizer in his book, "Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union," is that Reagan's inner circle implemented a hush-hush and wide-ranging line of attack that critically undermined the Soviet economy.

Schweizer spotlights how the Reagan administration's covert policy in the 1980s restricted the Soviet Union's access to technology imports, subverted its empire's solidity by backing indigenous forces in Poland and Afghanistan, acutely cut Soviet income from natural gas and oil exports and forced a reallocation of dwindling Soviet resources by means of a high-tech American military buildup.

The cumulative effect was a squeeze play -- more money out, less money in. For how it looked from inside the Kremlin, Schweizer interviews Oleg Kalugin, a former KBG general, and Yevgenny Novikov, a former senior staffer of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee. "American policy in the 1980s was a catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union," says Kalugin. From Novikov, an unambiguous acknowledgment that the Reagan administration's strategy was a "major factor in the demise of the Soviet system."

As Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense under Reagan, now describes it, what was launched against the Soviets was "a comprehensive strategy that included economic warfare," an offensive set in motion by three top-secret national security decisions in 1982 and 1983. First, a directive to "neutralize" Soviet control over Eastern Europe through covert assistance to anti-Soviet organizations in the region, followed by two directives that built a "strategic trade triad" to cut off "Western life support" to Moscow.

It was a line of attack that jacked up Moscow's price of empire, both in Europe and Afghanistan, while simultaneously curtailing its earnings from natural gas exports, restricting its access to Western loans and technology, and decimating its oil-exporting earnings by means of a deal with the Saudis that dropped the world price of oil by two-thirds. Add a costly arms race, plus the threat of the Strategic Defense Initiative, plus a cloak-and-dagger CIA operation that injected technological disinformation into the Soviet system, and it's a clear formula for an American victory, all without a shot being fired.

All things considered, not bad for an old guy who was accused of grabbing a nap during cabinet meetings.