Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [44]
Moreover, it occasionally makes good sense for leaders to lie to their own people. It seems to me, for example, that President Kennedy was right to lie to the American people about the deal he cut with the Soviets on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, since that lie helped settle the Cuban Missile Crisis and avert a possible war between the nuclear-armed superpowers.
Lying does not always work, however. It is difficult for leaders to snooker other states, because inter-state lies are usually directed at potential or real adversaries who are understandably suspicious of anything their opponents might say about matters relating to their security. This lack of trust between rival states explains in good part why there is not much lying between them. It was hard for someone like Churchill or Roosevelt to get away with lying to Hitler, or visa versa—and certainly not for long—because they were just too suspicious of each other. Although it is easier for a leader to lie to his public—because people tend to trust their own government—lying to fellow citizens does not always work either. For example, Roosevelt lied about the Greer incident in 1941 to help get the United States more deeply involved in World War II. But his lies had hardly any effect on the American public, which remained in an isolationist mood until Pearl Harbor.
Failure to hoodwink the intended target is not the only thing that can go wrong when leaders tell international lies. There is also the danger that their lies will be exposed and harm rather than help their country, as happened when the Eisenhower administration told a series of lies after the Soviet Union had shot down a U-2 spy plane. Of course, lies can backfire even if they are not exposed and are believed by the leaders of the target country. This is what happened when Khrushchev exaggerated the size of the Soviet ICBM arsenal in the late 1950s. He ended up fueling an arms race which he did not want and which was not in his country’s best interest. The Johnson administration’s lying about events in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 is another case where a well-told set of lies backfired. Those falsehoods played an important role in getting the United States into the Vietnam War. Similarly, the Bush administration told various lies in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which were not exposed at the time and helped sell the case for toppling Saddam Hussein from power. In both of those cases, the fearmongering led to strategic disasters for the United States.
Backfiring is just one potential downside of international lying; the other is blowback, and it is the more worrisome of the two. Leaders who lie to their citizenry for what they believe are good strategic reasons might nevertheless do significant damage to their body politic by fostering a culture of dishonesty. This is why fearmongering and strategic cover-ups are the most dangerous kinds of lies that leaders can tell. Both carry a risk of blowback because they involve leaders lying to their publics, and both are also prone to producing foreign-policy debacles. The potential costs associated with the other three kinds of international lies—nationalist mythmaking, liberal lies, and inter-state lies—are not nearly as great as with fearmongering and strategic cover-ups.
What lessons can we draw for future American foreign policy from this examination of international lying? The United States emerged from the Cold War as the most powerful state in the world. That situation is not likely to change in the foreseeable future, as there is only one state—China—that could challenge America’s position of primacy.