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 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 secret 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 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.

Eisenhower and Dulles

Republican spokesman John Foster Dulles took the lead in promoting a rollback policy. He wrote in 1949:

We should make it clear to the tens of millions of restive subject people in Eastern Europe and Asia, that we do not accept the status quo of servitude and aggressive Soviet Communism has imposed on them, and eventual liberation is an essential and enduring part of our foreign policy.

The 1952 Republican national platform reaffirmed this position; when Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected, he appointed Dulles as secretary of state. Eisenhower adviser Charles Douglas Jackson to coordinate psychological warfare against communism. Radio Free Europe, a private agency funded by Congress, broadcast attacks on Communism directed to Eastern Europe. A strategic 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 rollback efforts in Europe.

Eisenhower relied on clandestine CIA actions to undermine hostile small governments and used economic and military foreign aid to strengthened governments supporting the American position in the Cold War. A successful rollback was the CIA's Operation Ajax in August 1953, in collaboration with the British, which assisted the Iranian military in their restoration of the Shah.

Hungary

Eisenhower's decision not to intervene during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 made containment a safer strategy than rollback, which risked a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Critics 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. 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 Gamal Abdel Nasser."

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 in 1983 to reinstate constitutional government following a Marxist coup — this invasion was the a dramatic example of rolling back a communist government in power. It led Moscow to worry that it might be next.

Reagan's interventions in the Third World 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 abandon the Soviet-Afghan war.

Nationalistic unrest in the Soviet Empire exploded in 1989, as the eastern European satellites all broke free. East Germany merged into West Germany. In 1991 the sixteen Soviet Socialist Republics declared their laws superior to those of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union cease to exist on December 25, 1991, as communism was rolled back across Europe.

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
• Bowie, Robert R., and Richard H. Immerman. Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (1998).
• Borhi, László. "Rollback, Liberation, Containment, or Inaction?: U.S. Policy and Eastern Europe in the 1950s," Journal of Cold War Studies, Fall 1999, Vol. 1 Issue 3, pp 67-110
• Grose, Peter. Operation Roll Back: America's Secret War behind the Iron Curtain (2000) online review
• Lesh, Bruce. "Limited War or a Rollback of Communism?: Truman, MacArthur, and the Korean Conflict," OAH Magazine of History, Oct 2008, Vol. 22 Issue 4, pp 47-53
• 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)