n.

The practice, especially in international politics, of seeking advantage by creating the impression that one is willing and able to push a highly dangerous situation to the limit rather than concede.

Origin: 1956

How do you fight a war without going to war? After ten years of Cold War (1946) with the Soviet Union, that was a paradox we were still trying to resolve. But President Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had no doubts about it. "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art," Dulles said in an interview early in 1956. "If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost."

There was good reason to be scared. Both the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were armed and dangerous. The United States had tested its first hydrogen bomb in 1952, the U.S.S.R. in 1953. Both sides had long-range aircraft to deliver the bombs. Neither side was deterred by the fear of "nuclear winter" (1983), an idea whose time would not come for thirty more years. In classrooms, the best we could do for our schoolchildren was to hold "duck and cover" drills so they could practice shielding themselves from the flash and blast of a distant atomic bomb.

Not every American favored going to the brink. Former governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, twice nominated as the Democratic candidate to run against Eisenhower, criticized Dulles in a speech in February 1956: "No, we hear the Secretary of State boasting of his brinkmanship--the art of bringing us to the edge of the nuclear abyss."

That word brinkmanship was modeled on the "gamesmanship" of Stephen Potter's 1947 book, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship or the Art of Winning Games Without Really Cheating. The sporting and humorous connotations of the suffix -manship applied to such a serious subject imply that the practitioner of brinkmanship is playing with catastrophe. Though the cold war is over, high-risk politics are not, and brinkmanship remains a vivid word to describe them.

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Usually associated with the Cold War practice of the superpowers wherein either might precipitate a crisis involving a potential nuclear holocaust (‘going to the brink’) in the hope that the adversary would make concessions on the issue in question (e.g. the 1961 crisis over Berlin or the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis). By analogy the term may include any high-stakes political ‘gamesmanship’, particularly in international politics.

— Geoffrey R. D. Underhill

The policy of a nation that pushes a dangerous situation to the limits of safety (the “brink”) before pulling back; an aggressive and adventurous foreign policy.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - legen med ilden

Nederlands (Dutch)
hoog spel spelen (m.n. politiek)

Français (French)
n. - art d'aller jusqu'aux limites du possible

Deutsch (German)
n. - Politik am Rande des Abgrunds

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (πολιτικοί) ακροβατισμοί

Italiano (Italian)
politica del rischio calcolato

Português (Portuguese)
n. - estratégia (f) de realizar ações arriscadas até o limite da catástrofe (Pol.)

Русский (Russian)
умение балансировать на грани возможного

Español (Spanish)
n. - política arriesgada o en la cuerda floja

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - konsten att föra en politik till randen av krig

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
边缘政策

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 邊緣政策

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 일촉측발의 상태까지 밀어붙이는 정책

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 瀬戸際政策

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) فن أو سياسه اتباع سياسه خطرة لحافه الحرب‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮הליכה על הסף‬

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