a declaration on friendly relations

This chapter reconstructs, in a descriptive and aspirational mode, lawful friendship through an encounter between the literary figure of ‘the friend’ and an international law of friendly and unfriendly relations. It begins with a gesture of elegiac friendship before locating friendship in an international law of enemies, criminals, pirates and neutrals. It finishes by elaborating a politics of international legal friendship and makes a plea for a tentative, careful friendliness suggested by friendships found in Montaigne, Nietzsche and Derrida, and in three moments of friendship set in the Cold War: one literary (the depiction of friendship in John Adams’ opera, Nixon in China), one an unlikely performance of anti-imperial friendly relations (the friendship between Nehru and Tito, begun in Belgrade) and one epistolary (a letter sent by Nikita Khrushchev to Fidel Castro in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis). Each represents in its rudimentary way a ‘lawful friendship’, a declaration on friendly relations.

Nuclear Weapons

A new nuclear arms race is underway between Russia and the United States, one that focuses on the technology of delivery of nuclear warheads. This book describes how and why this race is happening, who still possesses nuclear weapons, and what constraints apply to those weapons under international law. A global nuclear ban treaty entered into force in January 2021, but the nuclear powers kept distant. The last remaining treaty restraining the arsenals of the two nuclear superpowers will expire in less than five years' time and the risk is that other States will turn to nuclear arms for their defence, further fracturing the non-proliferation regime installed after the Cuban missile crisis.

Cuba’s Indigenous Revolution, 1959–1970

Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara prosecuted a guerrilla war that brought them to power in January 1959. They were socialist in orientation, but not yet faithful to a communist party. US hostility to the new regime’s policies of nationalization of industries controlled by US companies led to intensification of political controls and the seeking of external protection and assistance from Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought to a head the issue of US determination to overthrow the Castro regime, but also led the superpowers to the brink of war.

A Question of Taste

Chapter 3 explores the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1962 tour of the United States, which took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the wake of the crisis, President Kennedy and his family staged numerous public meetings with the Bolshoi dancers to soothe the mounting political tensions. In the critical reception of the Bolshoi, however, a less conciliatory strain emerged. American critics understood the Soviet works through the lens of taste, a framework related to domestic struggles about the positioning of ballet in an aesthetic and class hierarchy. They disparagingly compared the Bolshoi’s new production of Spartacus to Hollywood epic films. These concerns were in turn related to a desire to foster the United States’ status as an emerging ideological empire.