Rollback

In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing 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 failed, in Korea in 1950, and 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 and a major war. When Republican Senator Barry Goldwater demanded Why Not Victory?, the title of his 1962 book, he was defeated in a landslide in 1964 because of the risk of nuclear war with the Soviets.

The rollback strategy succeeded in Grenada in 1983. Ronald Reagan promoted a rollback strategy against what he called the "evil empire" (the Soviet Union) in the 1980s. NATO has deployed a rollback strategy in Afghanistan since 2001 to end the power of the Taliban. Rollback of governments hostile to the U.S. took place in the American Civil War (1861–65), World War I (against Germany 1918), World War II (against Italy 1943, Germany 1945 and Japan 1945), 1953 Iranian coup d'état, (against Mohammad Mosaddegh), Chile (against Salvador Allende in 1973), Panama (against Noriega, 1989), and Iraq (against Saddam Hussein 2003). Today rollback is sometimes called "regime change".