Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [31]
Finally, we now know that Japan reached a number of secret agreements with the United States during the Cold War. For example, Tokyo agreed in 1969 to allow nuclear-armed American ships to dock at Japanese ports.10 There was also a secret accord that called for Japan to help pay a large part of the cost of stationing American troops on Japanese soil. These agreements would have been exceedingly controversial had they been made public; in fact, the ensuing uproar probably would have forced Japan’s leaders to abrogate them. After all, the law in Japan prohibited nuclear-armed vessels from entering Japanese ports. Because the leadership thought that the accords were in Japan’s national interest, they were hidden from the public. However, it did not take long before outsiders began to suspect that those agreements existed, and point blank questions about them were directed at Japanese leaders. Not surprisingly, they responded by lying and denying that those deals had been struck.
WHEN STRATEGIC COVER-UPS ARE LIKELY
Stipulating when strategic cover-ups are more or less likely is somewhat complicated because this kind of deception involves two kinds of behavior—hiding incompetence and masking controversial policies—and two different audiences—other countries and the leader’s own public.
For starters, let us focus on the question of when a leader is likely to lie to help hide either a failed or controversial policy from another country. Not surprisingly, the circumstances that are likely to push leaders to engage in inter-state lying also apply to strategic cover-ups. In both cases, leaders are lying to another state because they think it is in the national interest. This means that leaders are more likely to engage in strategic cover-ups aimed at foreign audiences when their country is: (1) located in a dangerous region, (2) involved in a crisis, (3) engaged in a war, or (4) dealing with a rival rather than an ally.
Strategic cover-ups, of course, are more than just inter-state lies; leaders direct them at their own people as well as the outside world. Masking incompetence from the public is most likely to occur in wartime, especially if the conflict is thought to be a fight for survival. The stakes will be so high in such a situation that leaders will not hesitate to lie to their citizenry if they think that it is necessary to avoid defeat and win the war. Furthermore, it is relatively easy to hide mistakes from the public in the midst of a war, because that is a circumstance in which governments are invariably given lots of leeway to limit and manipulate the flow of information. Plus, deception is widely considered to be an important instrument for fighting a deadly adversary. Finally, botched operations of one sort or another are commonplace in almost every conflict, which means that there will be plenty of opportunities, as well as the incentive, to engage in strategic cover-ups.11
What about controversial policies? They are more likely to be hidden from the public in democracies than nondemocracies. The most obvious reason for this is that leaders in a democracy must pay more attention to public opinion, because they are held accountable for their actions through regular elections. They cannot enunciate a policy that they think is wise but sure to be unpopular and then ignore the political fallout. In such cases, leaders