Description
IR trust scholarship has emphasized the importance of developing trusting relationships between leaders of adversarial states to overcome interstate distrust. However, the utility of such relationships seems to be temporary: once one of the leaders leaves office, interpersonal trust development must start anew. Taking up this issue, this paper asks if and how leader-to-leader trust can be preserved for future generations to rely on. It contends that a way to do so is to vest such trust into informal trust institutions. We put forth the Moscow-Washington hotline as such an institution and show how it grew out of trust development between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev. We will demonstrate that both Kennedy and Khrushchev recognized the lack of and need for trust and strove to establish it. We will then trace the process of such trust development, showing how it culminated in the mutual understanding that each leader wished to avoid nuclear war by late 1962. This led to the creation of the Moscow-Washington hotline—the first tangible outcome of arms control negotiations—, which paved the way for the long-sought Test Ban treaty. Finally, we will show that future generations built on the trust narrative that surrounded the hotline to facilitate major arms control agreements in the Cold War.
