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 . 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 ) , 1954 Guatemalan coup ( against Jacobo Árbenz ) , Panama ( against Noriega , 1989 ) , and Iraq ( against Saddam Hussein 2003 ) . Today rollback is sometimes called " regime change " . 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 against the Soviet Union was proposed by conservative strategist James Burnham 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 . 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 . The process proved most successful in undermining the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s . 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 United States 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 : 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 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 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 US 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 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 . " 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 armed movements in Afghanistan , Angola , Cambodia , Nicaragua 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 . Moscow worried that it might be next . 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 . 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 . " Nationalistic unrest in the Soviet Empire exploded in 1989 , as most of the Eastern European satellites broke free and rolled back Communism peacefully , with the exception of the violent revolution in Romania to rollback Communism . East Germany merged with West Germany . In 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 .