During the Cold War, American and Russian officials and diplomats were in constant communication. The Cuban missile crisis was resolved, not by isolating each other, but by communicating with each other. Contrary to American mythology, the Cuban missile crisis was resolved, not when Kennedy coldly stared down Khrushchev and forced him to back down, but when Kennedy’s passing messages to and communicating with Khrushchev led to a negotiated settlement. Attorney-General Robert Kennedy was in constant communication with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, as was President Kennedy with Nikita Khrushchev.
Following the Cuban missile crisis, Richard Sakwa says in his new book The Culture of the Second Cold War, a telephone hotline was maintained between Washington and Moscow. He says that, during the Cold War, these telephone hotlines became part of an elaborate system of diplomatic infrastructure. Back-channel diplomacy was a regular occurrence, and lines of communication were kept always open.
In the Second Cold War, centered around the war in Ukraine, this is no longer the case. Now talking to Russia’s president is considered treasonous because it legitimizes him, and diplomatic communication is considered collusion. Russian and American diplomats don’t talk. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has barely, if ever, officially spoken to Russia foreign minister Sergei Lavrov since the war began, and President Biden has not met with President Putin once. By the summer of 2024, Biden was still maintaining that “I have no good reason to talk to Putin right now,” thus introducing the entirely novel theory that diplomacy is an instrument to be used at times of peace but not at times of war.
And the gag order on talking to the enemy is not just at the level of diplomacy and government. There is a whole industry of choking funds to online and social media sites that publish information outside the official narrative. The CIA has even pressured Twitter (X) to suppress a “long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of ‘anti-Ukraine narratives.” Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that “NATO must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: From tanks to tweets.”
But the war against communication goes beyond suppression and censorship. All three parties to the war – Ukraine, Russia and the United States – have actively banned and silenced the media of the enemy.
Hellbound and Down 