Rollback policy

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Rollback ( English "roll back", "roll back") is the term for during the Cold War by the United States ' democratic and free expressed intention of the influence of the western world expand "and those of the Soviet Union in her already-controlled areas and states to eliminate. The strategy for rollback developed under the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1953-1959, under Dwight D. Eisenhower ) was based on the confidence in one's own nuclear superiority that persisted until the Sputnik shock . It also included the willingness to take risks in armed conflict. The idea of ​​a necessary rollback arose out of dissatisfaction with the containment policy , which had not stopped the installation of socialist governments in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia. The rollback , however, was never translated into a coherent policy, as the nuclear stalemate prevented any direct confrontation between the two superpowers and instead led to proxy wars in the Third World .

Under the influence of conservative think tanks , the rollback began to increasingly influence US foreign policy again in the 1980s . As part of the Reagan Doctrine , anti-communist guerrilla movements have been funded, armed, and logistically and technically supported to overthrow pro-Soviet or socialist governments, particularly in Afghanistan , Angola and Nicaragua . These measures often took the form of covert operations ( Iran-Contra affair ); The unintended consequences of this policy and the counter-reactions, which the public did not understand because of their unknown causes, have been given the designation blowback based on the rollback .

literature

• Keller, Patrick: Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy: Ideas, War, and Strategy from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush . Paderborn 2008.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Paul Kengor: The Crusader. Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. Harper Perennial, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-118924-1 , pp. 165-173 (English).
2. ↑ NSDD-75: US relations with the USSR. (PDF) Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, January 17, 1983, accessed August 11, 2020 . 
3. ^ Paul Thomas Chamberlin: The Cold War's Killing Fields. Rethinking the Long Peace. HarperCollins, New York 2018, ISBN 978-0-06-236722-8 , pp. 498-499 (English).