Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [12]
My claim that there has not been much inter-state lying over time is based on two considerations. First, I had difficulty finding examples of leaders lying to each other, although I certainly found some cases, most of which are discussed below. I also asked other scholars who are well versed in international history if they could provide me with examples of statesmen and diplomats lying to one another. Their initial reaction—like mine—was that there must be an abundance of such cases; but in the end virtually everyone I approached had trouble finding more than a few clear-cut cases of inter-state lying.
Of course, one’s definition of lying affects any assessment of how much lying there has been among states, or any other kind of lying, for that matter. Sissela Bok, for example, notes in her important treatise on lying that some people define the concept of lying so broadly that they “take all forms of deception to be lies, regardless of whether or not they involve statements of any kind.” When this expansive definition is employed, people can then say that lying is rampant in daily life, and “that the average person lies ten, twenty, a hundred times a day.”2
If applied to international politics, this definition of lying would include spinning and concealment, as well as consciously telling a deliberate untruth, and one could therefore say that inter-state lying was commonplace. But if one defines lying more narrowly, as Bok and I do, it is not nearly as widespread, although it is surely not unknown. I believe a narrower definition makes more sense, because it allows us to discriminate between different forms of deception and to theorize about when and why each may be employed.
One might argue that statesmen and diplomats who lie to each other are not going to admit it, and indeed are likely to go to some lengths to hide it. Perhaps there are numerous cases of inter-state lying, but I have failed to uncover most of them because they are well-hidden from those who were not involved in the decision-making process. This line of argument certainly has some merit when analyzing contemporary events, since important information is almost always concealed from the public, and it is therefore hard for outsiders to know what transpired behind closed doors. Also, the further back in history we go, the more incomplete the records are about the policymaking process in virtually every country, which means that inter-state lying might have been commonplace long ago, but we cannot expose it. There are even some recent cases where the historical record is spotty, which again raises the possibility of deeply buried lies.
Still, I do not think there are many well-concealed interstate lies lurking in the past. I base this claim on the fact that we do have plenty of information on many important foreign-policy decisions made over the past two centuries by a variety of countries, which would make it difficult for leaders to hide their lies so well that they would never be discovered. This would be especially true for lies that had a major impact on a country’s foreign policy. After all, a deliberate deception campaign usually involves many people, and at least some of them are bound to talk eventually. Plus, the written records, which are extensive in many of these cases, have now come to light. Thus, most of the key details of many recent historical events have become public—including the lies. This is not