Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [1]
What seems to make the subject even more interesting to many is that I argue that there are sometimes good strategic reasons for leaders to lie to other countries as well as to their own people. International lying, in other words, is not necessarily misconduct; in fact, it is often thought to be clever, necessary, and maybe even virtuous in some circumstances.
Yet no argument I make is more controversial and generates more discussion than my claim that statesmen and diplomats do not lie to each other very often. Hardly anyone seems to believe this is true—at least when they first hear it. Most people are surprisingly cynical on this issue. They seem to believe that there are countless examples where leaders around the world lied to each other and that therefore it should be easy to come up with a long list of those kinds of lies. In essence, they believe that inter-state lying is business as usual in international politics. I tell my interlocutors that as a card-carrying realist I was inclined at first to agree with them, but after studying the matter I have come to believe they are wrong. There is just not that much inter-state lying. Of course, this is not to say there is none.
The subject also resonates because of the Iraq war. Many well-informed people now believe that the Bush administration lied to the American people in the run-up to that conflict, which has turned into a strategic disaster for the United States. When a war goes badly and the public believes that deception helped make the war possible in the first place, people invariably get very interested in talking about why leaders would lie to their own citizens and what the likely consequences are. Plus the fact that there is hardly any literature on lying in international politics allows—or even compels—people to think creatively about these matters.
Given the dearth of literature on international lying and what seems to be a significant interest in the subject, I decided to turn my unpublished paper on lying into a book. My main aim was to provide some analytical frameworks that might help organize how we think about lying in international politics, as well as some theoretical claims about key aspects of that subject. I hope this book will be a conversation starter on an important topic that hitherto has received scant attention. If I am successful, others will follow in my footsteps and refine and challenge my arguments.
My thinking about lying has been markedly influenced by feedback from the audiences at the various places where I have spoken: the Council on Foreign Relations in New York; the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University; the 2004 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association; a faculty-student seminar at the University of Montana; the Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania; the MIT Political Science Department; the University of Chicago’s Program on International Security Policy; the Lone Star National Security Forum; and the “North-South” workshop jointly run by the internationalrelations faculties of Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
When I was in the early stages of organizing my thoughts on the subject, I benefited greatly from an informal seminar with five of my colleagues at the University of Chicago: Dong Sun Lee, Taka Nishi, Robert Pape, Sebastian Rosato, and John Schuessler. I am especially thankful for the extensive and especially useful comments provided by Alexander Downes, Sean Lynn-Jones, Marc Trachtenberg, and Stephen Walt, whose fingerprints are all over this manuscript.
Two other individuals deserve a special word of thanks. David McBride, my editor at Oxford University