Description
The Moscow-Washington hotline is a rapid communication device that was established to prevent conflict escalation into nuclear war by allowing Soviet and American leaders to speak to each other. Based on this, the majority of the existing scholarly literature about the hotline attributes its conflict management function to its speed and direct communication. However, talk may be cheap, and it is unclear why leaders would not deceive each other or continue antagonistic distrust-based interaction that prevented them from reaching agreements or compromise via lower level diplomatic channels. We follow the small number of IR scholars who suggest that the hotline had a symbolic function, but we suggest a different interpretation of its symbolism. Thus, in this article, we use symbolic interactionist role theory to argue that the hotline was an informal institution symbolizing trust and to explain how the hotline fulfilled its role as a risk of war measure via its trust function.
