Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [14]
All of this is to say that lying has its limits as a tool of statecraft.
WHY STATES LIE TO EACH OTHER
The main reason that leaders lie to foreign audiences is to gain a strategic advantage for their country. Because states operate in an anarchic world, where there is no night watchman to protect them in case of serious trouble, they have no choice but to provide for their own security. The best way that states can maximize their prospects for survival is to gain power at their rivals’ expense. However, they can also use deception, which includes lying, to achieve an advantage over a potential adversary. In a dangerous world, leaders do what they must to insure their country’s survival. Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs during the Kennedy administration, captured this point when he said, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, “I think the inherent right of the Government to lie to save itself when faced with nuclear disaster is basic.”6 Some twenty years later, President Jimmy Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, remarked, “But Sylvester, of course, was right. In certain circumstances, government not only has the right but a positive obligation to lie.”7
In practice, inter-state lying takes different forms and operates according to different logics. Let us consider some of the ways in which states lie to each other. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, although most inter-state lies would fit into one of these categories.
First, leaders sometimes exaggerate their state’s capabilities for purposes of deterring an adversary, or maybe even coercing it. For example, Hitler lied about German military capabilities during the 1930s. He tried to inflate the Wehrmacht’s strength so as to discourage Britain and France from interfering with German rearmament as well as his aggressive foreign policy moves, like the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936.8 In roughly the same period, Josef Stalin’s infamous purges did serious damage to the fighting power of the Red Army. Worried that this might make the Soviet Union look weak and invite an attack from Nazi Germany, Stalin and his lieutenants put out the word that the Soviet military was a formidable fighting force, when they knew it was not.9
Another instance of this kind of inter-state lying occurred during the Cold War, after the Soviets launched the first-ever intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in October 1957.10 The strategic nuclear balance at the time clearly favored the United States. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev took advantage of his country’s early lead in ICBMs to claim that the Soviet Union had an ICBM capability that was far greater than what they actually had. Khrushchev’s lying over the next three years contributed to the famous myth of the “missile gap,” in which the United States was thought to be at a serious disadvantage in terms of strategic missiles. In fact, the opposite was true: the Soviet Union had far fewer ICBMs than the United States. Khrushchev’s reason for exaggerating Soviet capabilities was to deter as well as coerce the United States. In particular, he wanted to make sure that the Americans did not launch a strategic nuclear strike against the Soviet Union in a crisis. He was also determined to put great pressure on the Eisenhower administration to abandon its plans to allow Germany to acquire nuclear weapons.
A second kind of inter-state lie is when a leader tells falsehoods for the purpose of minimizing the importance of a particular military capability, or even hiding it from rival countries. The deceiver’s aim might be