- See rollback (data management) for the operation that returns a database to some previous state or Wikipedia:Rollback for the specific rollback function of Wikipedia.
Rollback was a term used by American foreign policy thinkers during the Cold War. It was defined as using military force to "rollback" communism in countries where it had taken root.
The western intervention in the Russian Civil War can be considered an attempt at rollback, but it was before this term came to be used.
The most important rollback period was during the Cold War when many Americans felt that they were in a life or death struggle against world communism. After the devastation of the Second World War, only an insignificant minority of Americans were prepared to rollback communism throughout the world. A compromise was to use intelligence services and other such efforts to achieve these ends. These attempts began as early as 1945 with attempts in Eastern Europe, including attempts to provide weapons to independence fighters in the Baltic States and the Ukraine. The most elaborate effort was against Albania, where a trained force of guerillas were landed by the Americans. The people failed to support these fighters, however, and they were mostly captured or killed.
After only a few years these uniformly unsuccessful efforts in Europe were abandoned. Later efforts at rollback would be confined to China and the developing world where they never successfully removed an entrenched communist government, but in some cases such as Guatemala helped overthrow governments that were leaning towards the Soviets.
The "rollback" movement gained significant ground, however, in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration, urged on by the conservative Heritage Foundation and other influential conservatives, began to channel weapons to anti-communist resistance movements in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua and other nations.
This effort 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 the effort led Moscow to question its Third World engagement, and, in the view of some, was a contributing factor in ending the former Soviet Union's global reach and ultimately eroding the Soviet Union's superpower status and contributing to the superpower's breakup.