Trusting Through the Moscow-Washington Hotline: A Role Theoretical Explanation of the Hotline's Contribution to Crisis Stability

Abstract

This article explores how the Moscow-Washington hotline has contributed to crisis stability. Drawing on symbolic interactionist role theory, the article argues that the hotline provides leaders with an opportunity to engage in altercasting behavior so as to trust each other, even if only temporarily, when they contact each other through the hotline to communicate about a situation they define as a crisis. This function of the hotline is particularly useful when leaders have not managed to develop interpersonal trust between them. This new understanding of the hotline questions the dominant view that it merely facilitates communication, and improves on existing symbolic understandings of the device by offering a conceptualization that explains why the intentions with which it is used to communicate are seen as credible. Furthermore, seeing trust as role contributes to trust scholarship in International Relations by offering a middle ground between defining trust as interests, which are often ambiguous in crises, and as shared identity, which is unattainable between adversaries in the short term. We use two historical cases studies, the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, to illustrate our theoretical claims.

Space Strategic Stability: Assessing U.S. Concepts and Approaches

“…65 Specialized mechanisms such as crisis hotlines convey the importance that both sides place on collaborating to avoid further escalation and provide what Thomas Schelling describes as "last minute reassurance when confidence doesn't exist." 66 Although crisis hotlines attract particular attention, more routine communications channels are often necessary to build trust. 67 Operator-level mechanisms such as exchanges of information related to military activities and doctrine, procedures for notification and mutual observation of military exercises and tests, and the creation of military-to-military communication links can increase predictability and avoid misperceptions and misunderstandings.…”

Global Nuclear (Back-Up) Hotline: Building Communication Norms Across NC2

“…For instance, the first nuclear hotline (direct communication link (DCL)) was established between Americans and Soviets in June 1963 after the Cuban missile crisis . This hotline worked well during Cold War (still operational) and provided leaders of both states a window of trust, however limited, within which they could communicate their intentions for peace during crisis and/or under likelihood of nuclear war (Simon and Simon 2020;Pious 2001). Moreover, it has been upgraded technologically since 1960s from relying exclusively on teleprinters, telegraphs and wire circuits 10 (Blacker and Duffy 2002, 118;Dobrynin 1995, 96-97;Smith 1996, 280-81) to include relatively secure satellite communication circuits (MoU 1971) to facsimile transmission capability in 1984 (MoU 1984) to fiber optic cable along with chat and email functions in 2007 that made transmission of messages instant (Bohn 2013).…”

“…However, Simon and Simon conducted a comprehensive study to explore the contribution of Moscow-Washington hotline towards crisis stability and suggested that hotline provides leaders an opportunity to communicate even if they have not developed interpersonal trust between them (Simon and Simon 2020). Likewise, there are studies that discuss actual use of Red Phone and Hotline during crisis (Nanz 2010), propose technical solution to ensure secure communications (Hall and Sands 2020), introduce few alternative NC3 approaches to strengthen nuclear stability (Jones 2019), suggest building hotline between national command and control authorities of arch-rivals (Hannah 2019), and assess the opportunities and challenges machine learning offers to the NC2 (Falcone 2019).…”