Red line (phrase)

"[1][2] The origin of the phrase in English traces back to the "Red Line Agreement" in 1928 between the largest oil companies of Britain, the USA, and France at the time of the end of the Ottoman Empire.

On September 27, 2012, at the 67th United Nations General Assembly at the UN Headquarters in New York City in a speech addressing Iran's nuclear program, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly added a red line to a prepared bomb cartoon.

[7] Secretary of State Warren Christopher used the phrase about NATO control over the peace-keeping mission in the Bosnian War on the CBS program Face the Nation on 22 October 1995.

For example, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, for which, whilst sanctions were issued, construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline continued, indicating a level of tolerance.

However when Russia commenced its full scale invasion in 2022, there were much broader consequences, for example cutting Russian banks off the SWIFT system, and a massive donation of arms from the US and Europe.

[14][2] A journalist described a "thin red streak tipped with a line of steel" with the appearance of the 93rd (Highland) Regiment and parts of the Turkish army as they stood before (and repelled) a vastly superior force of Russian cavalry.

"[2] Notable literary uses included George Orwell who in A Clergyman's Daughter invented a book-within-a-book called the "Hundred Page History of Britain, a 'nasty little duodecimo book' of 1888, which declared anachronistically that Napoleon 'soon found that in the "thin red line" he had more than met his match.