Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [20]
Leaders are also more likely to lie in a crisis than during periods of relative calm. A state bent on avoiding war will have powerful incentives to spread falsehoods if doing so will help end the crisis without a fight. On the other hand, a leader determined to turn a crisis into a war will almost certainly lie if he thinks that doing so will help create the conditions for launching and winning the war. None of this is to deny that each side in a crisis will be suspicious of the other’s pronouncements, which will make it difficult, although not impossible, to tell persuasive lies.
Furthermore, inter-state lying is likely to be much more prevalent in wartime than peacetime. In his 1928 book on lying during World War I, the British politician Arthur Ponsonby writes that “there must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world’s history.”39 Although it would be virtually impossible to prove that claim because of the impracticality of counting all of the international lies told over time, there surely was a substantial amount of lying during the Great War, as Ponsonby and others make clear. At the same time, it is hard to think of a five-year period during the century before 1914—when few wars were fought in Europe—where there is evidence of lying on the scale we see in World War I.
It is not surprising that leaders often turn to lying when shooting starts. War is a deadly serious business in which foreign-policy elites often think that their states’ survival is at stake. But even in conflicts where the stakes are lower—like the United States in Vietnam or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—leaders usually believe that defeat would do serious damage to their national interest. That kind of thinking makes it easy for leaders to justify lying. There are also many opportunities to lie in wartime, since wars consist of numerous political and military engagements in which there are powerful incentives to deceive the other side. This is why deception is considered an integral part of war.
Finally, leaders are more likely to lie to rival states than allies. “Truth for friends and lies for enemies,” as one scholar put it many years ago.40 By definition, a rival is more dangerous than an ally, which means that it is more important to find ways to gain an advantage over an adversary than a friendly country. Lying sometimes serves that purpose. And because allies can help a state deal with a formidable rival, there are strong incentives for countries to have good relations with their allies and to build a modicum of trust with them, which is hardly served by lying to them. Of course, the fact that allies tend to trust each other more than their rivals makes it somewhat easier for allies to lie to each other than to their rivals, who are naturally more suspicious of their adversaries’ pronouncements. Still, lying to an ally comes at a stiff price if it is discovered, as it surely would undermine trust and damage the partnership, which would ultimately hurt the country that told the lie.
This is not to deny that states occasionally conclude that it makes good strategic sense to bamboozle an ally. No two countries always have the same interests—including allies—and it is possible in a crisis that one ally will abandon another or even turn on its partner. Moreover, today’s friends can morph into tomorrow’s enemy. Remember that the Soviet Union attacked Japan at the end of World War II after falsely promising Tokyo a few months earlier that it had no such intentions. The absence of permanent allies explains why the international system is ultimately a self-help world. This basic logic also explains why Israel lied to the United States during the 1960s about the fact that it was developing nuclear weapons. Israeli leaders have long believed that it is essential to have good relations with the United States. But they obviously felt more strongly that Israel needed its own nuclear deterrent to insure its