The late John Foster Dulles used to talk about the “roll-back,” although how he proposed to get Stalin, or even Khrushchev, to agree to evacuate the new Soviet empire in Eastern Europe remained obscure. The term became unfashionable when Hungary exploded and all the West did was stand idly by.
Subject as always to correction, I am not aware that even Dulles at his most evangelistic meant the “roll-back” to include the USSR itself. Alas, Communism continued to spread and so, despite the great Sino-Soviet rift, did the Soviet empire.




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