Rollback

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 partially successful in Korea in 1950, but not in Cuba in 1961. 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]

Terminology

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]

World War II

In American strategic language, rollback is the policy of totally annihilating an enemy's armed forces and occupying the country, as was done in World War II to Italy, Germany, and Japan.[5][6]

Cold War

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; the decision was not to.[8]

Instead of military rollback, the U.S. began a program of long-term psychological warfare to delegitimize Communist and 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]

The Truman administration saw the Soviet Union as the main adversary and began discussing how to launch coordinated political, non-military actions to roll back its presence in Eastern Europe without a hot war.[10][11] The rollback policy failed. Historian Stephen Long argues that the key policy makers, especially the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, failed to devise a coherent strategy. Furthermore Long blames the disordered bureaucracy that impaired and strategically dislocated the operations planned by the Office of Policy Coordination.[12]

Rollback strategies proved most successful in undermining the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.[13]

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.[14] The rollback strategy, however, caused the Chinese to intervene, and US forces were pushed back to the 38th parallel. The failure of a complete rollback despite its advocacy by MacArthur, moved the United States to commit to the alternate strategy of containment.[15] The U.S. had moved from a strategy of containment, to one of rollback, and returned to containment in late 1950-early 1951.[16]

In 1954, the Pentagon wanted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to endorse a rollback strategy in Asia against Soviet advances. No, He replied, "the time of a significant rollback was far in the future."[17]

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 [that] aggressive Soviet Communism has imposed on them, and eventual liberation is an essential and enduring part of our foreign policy.[18]

The 1952 Republican Party's national platform reaffirmed this position; when Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected, he appointed Dulles as Secretary of State. Eisenhower adviser Charles Douglas Jackson coordinated psychological warfare against Communism. Radio Free Europe, a private agency funded by Congress, broadcast attacks on Communism directed at Eastern Europe.[19] 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 strengthen 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 anti-democratic restoration of the Shah.[20]

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.

Both Eisenhower and Dulles focused more attention on the Suez Crisis which, due to the Protocol of Sèvres, unfolded simultaneously. The Suez Crisis played an extremely important role in hampering the US response to the crisis in Hungary. The problem was not, contrary to widespread belief, that Suez distracted US 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."[8]

Reagan administration

In 1984, journalist Nicholas Lemann interviewed Reagan Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Lemann summarized the strategy of the Reagan administration to roll back the Soviet Union:

Their society is economically weak, and it lacks the wealth, education, and technology to enter the information age. They have thrown everything into military production, and their society is starting to show terrible stress as a result. They can't sustain military production the way we can. Eventually it will break them, and then there will be just one superpower in a safe world – if, only if, we can keep spending." [21]

Lemann notes that when he wrote that in 1984, he thought the Reaganites were living in a fantasy world. But in 2016, he says, that passage represents "a fairly uncontroversial description of what Reagan actually did."

The "rollback" movement gained significant ground, however, in the 1980s, specifically against the Soviet Union, as the Reagan administration urged on by The Heritage Foundation and other influential conservatives began to channel weapons to movements such as the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua and others in anti-communist armed movements Angola, Cambodia and other nations, and launched a successful invasion of Grenada in 1983 to protect American residents and reinstate constitutional government following a coup by what Reagan called "a brutal gang of leftist thugs,"—this invasion was presented as a dramatic example of rolling back a Communist government in power.[22][23] Moscow worried that it might be next.[24]

Reagan's interventions in the Third World came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine. It was applied especially to pro-Communist regimes in Central America, as in Grenada and Nicaragua, and was also extended to Angola, Afghanistan, and Cambodia.[25]

Critics argued that the Reagan Doctrine led to so-called blowback and an unnecessary intensification of Third World conflict. On the other hand, in the various rollback battlefields, the Soviet Union made major concessions and eventually had to abandon the Soviet-Afghan war. Jessica Martin writes, "Insofar as rollback is concerned, American support for rebels, especially in Afghanistan, at the time helped to drain Soviet coffers and tax its human resources, contributing to that nation's overall crisis and eventual disintegration."[26][27]

This rollback strategy played out in Third World nations that the Soviets had penetrated. Together with heavy pressure on the Soviet military, exemplified by the Star Wars missile defense system, the Soviet system cracked, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Nationalistic unrest in the USSR exploded in 1989, as all of the Eastern European satellites broke free and rolled back Communism relatively peacefully, with the exception of the violent revolution in Romania. East Germany merged with West Germany.

Between 1988 and 1991, the fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics declared their laws superior to those of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 25, 1991, as Communism was rolled back across all of Europe.[28]

George H.W. Bush

After the invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, a coalition of Western militaries deployed to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. After several months of negotiation and diplomacy, an American-led force started air and ground operations to dislodge the invasion and return Kuwait to sovereignty. While the campaign successfully freed Kuwait, many military leaders and American politicians called for a full invasion of Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein. Bush's failure to use the rollback strategy, which is popular among many conservative leaders in the United States, contributed to his failure to win re-election as president in 1992. According to many, the consequences of the decision not to remove Hussein from power in 1991 significantly contributed to the decisions of the Administration of George W. Bush, son of the former president, to invade Iraq in 2003.

War on Terror

George W. Bush

President George W. Bush's policies were similar to those of his father. Following the September 11 attacks, his administration, along with a NATO coalition, undertook a war in Afghanistan to stop the al-Qaida terrorist group responsible for the attacks. Bush told Congress:

The Taliban must act and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.[29]

Similarly, Bush opposed the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, labeling the regime as part of an "axis of evil", which also included Iran and North Korea.[30] Additionally, the administration believed Hussein possessed nuclear weapons.[31] As a result, in March 2003, the U.S. military invaded Iraq and overthrew Hussein's regime.

Obama Administration

In September 2014, after ISIL had outraged public opinion by beheading two American journalists and had seized control of large portions of Syria and Iraq against ineffective opposition from American allies, President Barack Obama announced a new objective for a rollback policy in the Middle East. He announced:

America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat. Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy."[32]

Donald J. Trump

As of 2017, the administration of President Donald J. Trump has continued the Obama administration's policies against ISIL.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Stöver 2004, pp. 97-102.
  2. ↑ Litwak, Robert (2007). Regime Change: U.S. Strategy Through the Prism of 9/11. Johns Hopkins U.P. p. 109. ISBN 9780801886423.
  3. ↑ The British and Foreign Review Or European Quarterly Journal. 1835. pp. 52–53.
  4. ↑ John Buchan (25 January 2011). Salute to Adventurers. p. 166. ISBN 9780755117154.
  5. ↑ Weigley, Russell F (1977), The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, pp. 145, 239, 325, 382, 391 .
  6. ↑ Pash, Sidney (2010), "Containment, Rollback and the Onset of the Pacific War, 1933–1941", in Piehler, G Kurt; Pash, Sidney, The United States and the Second World War: New Perspectives on Diplomacy, War, and the Home Front, pp. 38–67 .
  7. ↑ Kelly, Daniel (2002), James Burnham and the struggle for the world: a life, p. 155 .
  8. 1 2 Borhi, László (1999), "Rollback, Liberation, Containment, or Inaction? U.S. Policy and Eastern Europe in the 1950s", Journal of Cold War Studies, 1 (3): 67–110, doi:10.1162/152039799316976814
  9. ↑ Weiner, Tim (2007), Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, New York: Doubleday, pp. 45–46 .
  10. ↑ Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (2001).
  11. ↑ Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Cornell UP, 2000).
  12. ↑ Stephen Long, "Strategic Disorder, the Office of Policy Coordination and the Inauguration of US Political Warfare against the Soviet Bloc, 1948–50." Intelligence and National Security 27.4 (2012): 459-487.
  13. ↑ Scott, James M (1996), Deciding to intervene: the Reagan doctrine and American foreign policy, p. 40 .
  14. ↑ Matray, James I (Sep 1979), "Truman's Plan for Victory: National Self-Determination and the Thirty-Eighth Parallel Decision in Korea", Journal of American History, JStor, 66 (2): 314–33, doi:10.2307/1900879, JSTOR 1900879 .
  15. ↑ Cumings, Bruce (2010), The Korean War: A History, pp. 25, 210 .
  16. ↑ James L. Roark; et al. (2011). Understanding the American Promise, Volume 2: From 1865: A Brief History of the United States. Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 740. ISBN 9781457608483.
  17. ↑ Robert R. Bowie; Richard H. Immerman (2000). Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy. Oxford UP. p. 171.
  18. ↑ Stöver 2004, p. 98.
  19. ↑ Puddington, Arch (2003), Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty .
  20. ↑ Prados, John (2009), "6", Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA .
  21. ↑ Nicholas Lemann, "Reagan: The Triumph of Tone" The New York Review of Books 10 March, 2016
  22. ↑ Thomas Carothers (1993). In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years. U. of California Press. pp. 113–15. ISBN 9780520082601.
  23. ↑ H. W. Brands, Jr., "Decisions on American Armed Intervention: Lebanon, Dominican Republic, and Grenada," Political Science Quarterly (1987) 102#4 pp. 607-624 quote at p 616 in JSTOR
  24. ↑ Vladislav Martinovich Zubok. A failed empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007) p. 275
  25. ↑ DeConde, Alexander, ed. (2002). Encyclopedia of American foreign policy. Scribner. p. 273. ISBN 9780684806594.
  26. ↑ Van Dijk, Ruud, ed. (2008). Encyclopedia of the Cold War. US: Taylor & Francis. p. 751. ISBN 9780203880210.
  27. ↑ Mann, James (2009), The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War .
  28. ↑ Rosenberg, Victor (2005). Soviet-American Relations, 1953–1960: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange During the Eisenhower Presidency. McFarland & Co. p. 260. ISBN 9780786419340.
  29. ↑ Bush, George W. (20 September 2001). "Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11". The American Presidency Project. Retrieved 2017-12-21.
  30. ↑ Bush, George W. (29 January 2002). "Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union". The American Presidency Project. Retrieved 2017-12-21.
  31. ↑ Bush, George W. (January 28, 2003). "Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union". American Presidency Project. Retrieved 2017-12-21.
  32. ↑ Tom Cohen, "Obama outlines ISIS strategy: Airstrikes in Syria, more U.S. troops," CNN Sept. 10, 2014

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 (2000), Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc 1947-1956 .
  • Stöver, Bernd (2004), "Rollback: an offensive strategy for the Cold War", in Junker, Detlef, United States and Germany in the era of the Cold War, 1945 to 1990, A handbook, 1: 1945–1968, pp. 97–102 .

Primary sources

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