Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [21]
CHAPTER 4
Fearmongering
Fearmongering occurs when a state’s leaders see a threat emerging but think that they cannot make the public see the wolf at the door without resorting to a deception campaign. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who worried that the American people might not fully appreciate the danger posed by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, argued that it was necessary for American leaders to make their arguments “clearer than truth,” because otherwise the public would not support the measures that he thought were necessary to deal with the threat.1 The aim is not just to deceive the average person in the street, but also to target educated elites, including outside experts who might be inclined to downplay the relevant threat in dangerous ways. Fearmongering campaigns can even be directed at government bureaucrats who might be disposed to soft-pedal a threat that their leaders think is particularly menacing. As distasteful as this behavior might be, leaders do it because they believe that it serves the public interest, not to exploit their fellow citizens for personal gain. The essence of fearmongering is captured by Kemal Atatürk’s famous phrase: “For the people, despite the people.”2
Leaders engaged in fearmongering might work to create a threat that hardly exists in the public’s mind, or more likely, they will exaggerate or “hype” a recognized threat that is not causing much alarm outside of government circles. The ultimate goal could be to build support for a containment policy by getting the public to back increased defense spending, enlist in the military, or support a draft. Threat inflation might also be used to mobilize support for launching a war against a dangerous adversary. Although fearmongering usually occurs in peacetime, it can take place in the midst of a war if leaders feel that their public or their military forces are wavering in their commitment to the fight.
Fearmongering has played an important role in U.S. foreign policy over the past seventy years. Indeed, three administrations have employed that strategy in hopes of dragging a reluctant American public into war. As noted, Franklin Roosevelt lied about the USS Greer incident in the late summer of 1941 to mobilize public opinion against Germany and hopefully get the United States into World War II.3 The USS Greer, an American destroyer operating in the North Atlantic, joined up with a British military aircraft that was pursuing a German submarine. The plane eventually dropped depth charges, but then had to return to its base because it was running low on fuel. The Greer, however, continued to pursue the submarine, which had not been disabled by the British plane’s depth charges. The submarine then fired a torpedo at the Greer, which responded with its own depth charges. Neither side hit its target. There was a final engagement between the Greer and the German submarine a few hours later, but again neither side hit the other.
A week later President Roosevelt went on radio and told the American people three lies about the Greer incident. He clearly implied that the attack on the Greer was unprovoked. He did not mention the British aircraft, much less that the Greer was pursuing the German submarine in tandem with that plane, which dropped depth charges against the submarine before it fired on the Greer.4 Instead, he simply said that the German submarine “fired first upon this American destroyer without warning, and with deliberate design to sink her” in American “defensive waters.” This attack, he said, was “piracy—piracy legally and morally.”5
Furthermore, Roosevelt maintained that the Greer’s identity as an American ship was “unmistakable” to the German submarine. In fact, Navy officials had told Roosevelt two days earlier that there was “no positive evidence that [the] submarine knew [the] nationality of [the] ship at which it was firing.” Finally, Roosevelt proclaimed that, “We have sought no shooting war with Hitler. We do not