The Moscow-Washington “Hot Line” (or “Red Phone,” though it never was red) became operational on August 30, 1963, when the United States sent a first test message — the standard “the quick brown fox . . . ” to which the USSR replied with a poetic description of a Moscow sunset. A Cold War icon, the hot line was the direct result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which exchanges between the Kremlin and the White House sometimes took dangerously long to send and decode. In bilateral agreement that the world deserved better than to be blown up by slow messaging, the two superpowers moved swiftly to a secure teletype system, now replaced by email.
One of the most unsettling chapters in hotline diplomacy occurred during the volatile later stages of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when President Nixon, according to the memoirs of many close to him, was too drunk or too depressed by his Watergate troubles to take command, or not trusted to do so by his secretary of state and national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. It was Kissinger who handled the back-and-forth on the hotline, keeping Nixon isolated until, as commander-in-chief, the president had to make a statement to the media — one that made things far worse, as Kissinger saw it. “The crazy bastard really made a mess with the Russians,” he tells White House chief of staff Alexander Haig in an October 26, 1973 telephone conversation.
Kissinger: First we had information of massive movement of Soviet forces. That is a lie. Second, this was the worst crisis since the Cuban missile crisis. True, but why rub their faces in it . . .
Haig: How about the rest of it. Disaster.
Kissinger: Yes, a disaster of something that is already a disaster. We are getting a hot line message tonight . . .
Recent books on Nixon and Kissinger draw different lessons from the Yom Kippur crisis, when Kissinger and a handful of his associates, none of them elected, took control of the hotline and the nation. In Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, Robert Dallek describes the crisis, which Kissinger managed to turn into a personal diplomatic victory, as a failed opportunity to realize the inherent dangers in an administration that malfunctions at the highest level:
The fact that the crisis ended without a Soviet-American military confrontation and with a groundbreaking agreement by Egypt to hold direct talks with Israel to rescue its Third Army, which was still surrounded, represented a significant gain for Nixon’s foreign policy. The Yom Kippur War then became not a cautionary tale of the need for an engaged president but a reinforcement of the belief that a weakened president could rely on skilled subordinates to effectively manage an overseas crisis.
The prospect of an under-informed or loose-canon president, allowing or requiring others to shape policy or control damage, looms over several recent books. Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman begins with a Kissinger statement Grandin reads as his guiding principle: “The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.” This mind-set, Grandin ominously notes, is what makes “Kissingerism without Kissinger” alive and well today.
In Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, David Milne examines nine thinker-politicians who have had a dominant impact on “the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy.” Milne portrays Kissinger, one of the nine, as a man “combining genuine insight with reckless bellicosity, seminal diplomatic achievements, and vivid illustrations of how an amoral worldview can lead to immoral outcomes.” But the fundamental conclusion for Milne, especially with the 2016 election upon us, is that foreign policy and the diplomacy needed to execute it must be based on informed historical perspective rather than personality-driven promises and perspectives:
Ultimately it is through studying history and aspiring towards objectivity — it is the trying that counts, for its achievement is impossible — that foreign policymakers can study dilemmas, contexualize threats, compare their magnitude to resources available, weigh humanitarian and reputational imperatives, and offer appropriately calibrated responses.
Image: Mock “Hot Line” from the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, via Wikipedia.
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Sig Nordal 