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

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.