“Why can’t we just lean on the Soviets until they go broke?” -Ronald Reagan
What Reagan did wasn't about breaking internal bonds, to be fair. Reagan bluffed the USSR into hideously overspending on their military and ruining their economy. Things like the actually-nonexistent Star Wars program to make most of their missiles obsolete made the USSR massively overbuild their arsenal so that some missiles could still get through the direct-energy-weapon grid that the US was supposedly building, at ruinous expense. His aggressive no-compromise stance, such as calling them "The Evil Empire," pushed the USSR to build even more weapons because they thought he was doing the same thing and prepping for an invasion, but meanwhile Reagan invested in building the US economy and railing theirs. Reagan ran some really effective propaganda campaigns and psyops along with economic warfare that ultimately led to the USSR's collapse.
It wasn't all Reagan of course, previous presidents had paved the way and the USSR's own stupidity such as Chernobyl, were no help, but it's a mistake not to see how effective Reagan's propaganda was at getting the USSR to dance to his tune, right off an economic cliff. Reagan was very much a money guy and he weaponized money very effectively.