Rollback

For other uses, see Rollback (disambiguation).

Rollback is the strategy of destroying an enemy state. In contrast with containment, which means preventing the expansion of the enemy state; and with détente, which means a working relationship with the enemy 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 failed, in Korea in 1950, and in Cuba in 1961. The United States discussed the use of rollback in Germany and Hungary in 1953 -- 1956, but decided against it to avoid the risk of Soviet intervention and a major war . When Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, demanded Why Not Victory? (1962), he was defeated in a landslide in 1964 because of the risk of nuclear war with the Soviets.

The rollback strategy succeeded in Panama (against Noriega, 1989), Grenada (1983), Iraq (against Saddam Hussein 2003). Ronald Reagan promoted a rollback strategy against what he called the "evil empire" (the Soviet Union) in the 1980s. The Soviets responded by ending the Cold War. NATO has deployed a rollback strategy in Afghanistan against the Taliban since 2001.

Rollback during the Cold War

Early years

In American strategic language, rollback is the policy of totally annihilating an enemy army and occupying the country, as was done in the American Civil War to the Confederacy, and in World War II to Germany and Japan.

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 détente 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.

Korea

in the Korean War, the United States and the United Nations officially endorsed a policy of rollback -- the destruction of the North Korean government, and sent UN forces across the 38th parallel to take over North Korea. The rollback strategy, however, caused the Chinese to intervene, and they pushed the UN forces back to the 38th parallel. the failure of the rollback policy, despite its advocacy by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, moved to the US to a commitment to the containment policy, without rollback..

China

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.

Iran

A more successful effort was the CIA's Operation Ajax in August 1953, which assisted the Iranian military in their restoration of the Shah.

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 successfully 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

• Cold War
• Containment
• Détente

Further reading

• Bodenheimer, Thomas, and Robert Gould. Rollback!: Right-wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (1999), hostile to the strategy
• Grose, Peter. Operation Roll Back: America's Secret War behind the Iron Curtain (2000)
• Meese III, Edwin. "Rollback: Intelligence and the Reagan strategy in the developing world," in Peter Schweizer, ed., The fall of the Berlin wall (2000), pp 77-86
• Mitrovich. Gregory. Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc 1947-1956 (2000)
• Stöder, Bernd. "Rollback: an offensive strategy for the Cold War," in Detlef Junker, ed. United States and Germany in the era of the Cold War, 1945 to 1990, A handbook: volume 1: 1945--1968 (2004) pp. 111-117.

Primary sources

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