Although the intellectual foundations of rollback date back to the nineteenth century, the emergence of the concept as a political strategy during the Cold War is inseparably bound up with the conceptual development of containment. Rollback emerged as the Republican Party's direct counterpart to the Democrats' containment model, especially as developed by George F. Kennan after 1946. Behind the new strategy stood the idea of taking the offensive to push communism back rather than just defensively containing it. Open and covert measures would preoccupy and weaken communist power by stirring up problems within its sphere, preventing its further expansion and ultimately forcing it to relinquish control over individual states. It was here that the proponents of rollback saw a crucial difference with the policy of containment, which, although it fought communist influence outside the East bloc by supporting endangered governments with financial and military aid, did not aim at actively liberating those peoples already “imprisoned” by communist regimes. The concepts rollback and liberation thus described the same thing.