Rollback

For other uses, see Rollback (disambiguation).

"Rollback", in American strategic language, is the policy of totally destroying an enemy army and occupying his country, as was done in the American Civil War and World War II. It was debated by United States foreign policy strategists during the Cold War with respect to Communism, especially in the Korean War and the Cold War.

Rollback during the Cold War

Early years

The most important period in which rollback was used, was during the early stages of the Cold War when many Americans felt that they were in a life or death struggle against world communism. After the devastation of the Second World War, only a small minority of Americans were prepared to attempt to roll back communism throughout the world by direct force of arms. Winston Churchill's 1946 address at Westminster College in Missouri, warned of "an iron curtain" descending across Europe. Former Vice president Henry Wallace, who favored friendly detente with the Soviets, broke with President Harry Truman on the issue. The notion of military rollback was proposed by James Burnham and other strategists in the late 1940s, but it gained wider currency when the Truman administration approved a document known as NSC-68 just before the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. NSC-68 had set rollback as an objective, but it failed to specify how to achieve that goal. The document explicitly ruled out most of the measures, including preemptive war, that would have been needed to pursue rollback in a realistic way.

A compromise to direct military intervention had developed, which used intelligence services to achieve these ends. 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.

A more ambitious effort was Operation Paper in November 1950; this included the arming and supplying of remnant Nationalist Chinese troops in eastern Burma, the 93rd Division under General Li Mi, to invade the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. All of Li Mi's brief forays into China were swiftly repulsed, and after another failure in August 1952, the United States began to scale back its support.

A more successful effort was Operation Ajax in August 1953, which organized and financed the Iranian coup d'état.

Switch to containment

A tactical alternative to rollback was containment, and the Eisenhower Administration adopted containment through National Security Council document NSC 162/2 in October 1953; this effectively abandoned the uniformly unsuccessful rollback efforts in Europe after only a few years. Some argue that an important opportunity for rollback was forfeited in October-November 1956, when Hungarian reformist leader Imre Nagy announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and when he and Hungarian insurgents called on the West for help against invading Soviet troops. President Eisenhower thought it too risky to intervene in a landlocked country such as Hungary and feared it might trigger a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. His Secretary of State John Foster Dulles mistakenly believed that Imre Nagy sided with the Soviet Union. On October 25, 1956, he sent a telegram to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade expressing his fears that the Imre Nagy-János Kádár government might take “reprisals” against the Hungarian “freedom fighters.” By the next day, October 26, State Department officials in Washington assumed the worst about Nagy, asserting in a top secret memorandum: “Nagy’s appeal for Soviet troops indicates, at least superficially, that there are not any open differences between the Soviet and Hungarian governments.” Both Eisenhower and Dulles focused more attention on the Suez Crisis, which due to allied collusion unfolded simultaneously. The Suez crisis played an extremely important role in hampering the U.S. response to the crisis in Hungary. The problem was not that Suez distracted U.S. attention from Hungary, but that it made the condemnation of Soviet actions very difficult. As Vice President Richard Nixon later explained: "We couldn't on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against [Gamel Abdel] Nasser."

Later efforts at rollback would be confined to the developing world. There were advocates of a rollback approach to Cuba especially at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Reagan Administration

The "rollback" movement gained significant ground, however, in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration, urged on by the Heritage Foundation and other influential conservatives, began to channel weapons to anti-communist resistance movements in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua and other nations, and launched a successful invasion of Grenada to reinstate constitutional government following a Marxist coup — this invasion was the sole case in the history of the Cold War of a Communist state successfuly rolled back into a Democratic Capitalist nation before the Revolutions of 1989.

This effort came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine. Critics argued that the Reagan Doctrine led to so-called blowback and an unnecessary intensification of Third World conflict, but in the various rollback battlefields, the Soviet Union made major concessions, and eventually had to retreat from Afghanistan.

As the retreat from the Soviet-Afghan war got under way, the subject nations of the Soviet Union started to prepare for their own independence. Violence broke out between the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic and the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Two years later, numerous Soviet Socialist Republics declared their laws superior to those of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union collapsed, and in some ways was already collapsing as the retreat got under way.

See also

• Containment

Further reading

• Grose, Peter. Operation Roll Back: America's Secret War behind the Iron Curtain (2000)
• Mitrovich. Gregory. Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc 1947-1956 (2000)

Primary sources

• Burnham, James. Struggle for the World (1947)