In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing a change in the major policies of a state, usually by replacing its ruling regime. It contrasts with containment, which means preventing the expansion of that state; and with détente, which means a working relationship with that state. Most of the discussions of rollback in the scholarly literature deal with United States foreign policy toward Communist countries during the Cold War. The rollback strategy was tried and was not successful in Korea in 1950 and in Cuba in 1961, but it was successful in Grenada in 1983. The political leadership of the United States discussed the use of rollback during the uprising of 1953 in East Germany and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but decided against it to avoid the risk of Soviet intervention or a major war.[1]
Rollback of governments hostile to the U.S. took place in World War II (against Italy 1943, Germany 1945 and Japan 1945), Afghanistan (against the Taliban 2001) and Iraq (against Saddam Hussein 2003). When directed against an established government, rollback is sometimes called "regime change".[2]
The term rollback was popularized in the 1940s and the 1950s, but the term is much older. Some Britons, opposed to Russian oppression against Poland, proposed in 1835 a coalition that would be "united to roll back into its congenial steppes and deserts the tide of Russian barbarism."[3] Scottish novelist and military historian John Buchan in 1915 wrote of the American Indian Wars, "I cast back to my memory of the tales of Indian war, and could not believe but that the white man, if warned and armed, would rollback [sic] the Cherokees."[4]
Rollback includes military operations designed to destroy an enemy's armed forces and occupy its country, as was done in World War II to Italy, Germany, and Japan.[5][6]
The notion of military rollback against the Soviet Union was proposed by conservative strategist James Burnham[7] and other strategists in the late 1940s, and by the Truman Administration against North Korea in the Korean War. Much debated was the question whether the U.S. should pursue a rollback strategy against Communism in Eastern Europe in 1953–56, which the United States ultimately decided against for fear of provoking direct conflict with the Soviet Union.[8]
Instead of overt military rollback, the United States focused primarily on long-term psychological warfare and military or clandestine assistance to delegitimize pro-Communist regimes and help insurgents. These attempts began as early as 1945 in Eastern Europe, including efforts to provide weapons to independence fighters in the Baltic States and Ukraine. Another early effort was against Albania in 1949, following the defeat of Communist forces in the Greek Civil War that year. In this case, a force of agents was landed by the British and Americans to try to provoke a guerrilla war, but it failed. The operation had already been betrayed to the Soviets by the British double-agent Kim Philby, and led to the immediate capture or killing of the agents.[9]