Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [16]
Another example of this kind of behavior involves Japan and the Soviet Union in the last year of World War II. They had a neutrality pact throughout most of World War II, but at Yalta in February 1945, Stalin promised Churchill and Roosevelt that the Red Army would attack Japan within three months after Nazi Germany was defeated. Japanese leaders suspected that such a deal had been made at Yalta and queried their Soviet counterparts, who replied that their relationship had not changed at all and was “developing normally on the basis” of the neutrality pact.18 The Soviets attacked Japan on August 8, 1945.
Sometimes leaders bent on concealing an aggressive action against another country are forced to lie about it when reporters at home start asking probing questions about the impending operation. Those lies, however, are ultimately aimed at the country that is being targeted, not the leaders’ own citizens. During the 1960 presidential campaign, for example, John F. Kennedy—the Democratic Party’s candidate—argued that the United States should help anti-Castro forces overthrow the Cuban leader.19 His opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, knew that the government was deeply involved in just such a scheme. But he also understood that he ran the risk of exposing the operation if he agreed with Kennedy. So he lambasted his opponent’s proposal—calling it “probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendation that he’s made during the course of the campaign”—even though he thought it was a smart idea and had fought for that policy inside the government. Nixon was lying to deceive Castro, not the American people. Indeed, he only wished he could tell them the truth.
President Jimmy Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, was put in a similar situation in April 1980, when a reporter asked him whether it was true that the United States was planning to launch a military operation to free the American hostages then being held in Iran. Although it was true, Powell felt that he had no choice but to lie and say it was not true, because otherwise he would have tipped off the Iranian government about the forthcoming rescue attempt.20 So he reluctantly deceived the reporter.
Fourth, a state might lie to downplay its hostile intentions toward a rival state, not to facilitate an attack, but to avoid needlessly provoking that rival. This logic was in evidence during the early days of the Cold War, when the countries of Western Europe created two mutual defense pacts: the Treaty of Dunkirk (1947) and the Treaty of Brussels (1948). Both agreements were said to be checks against a resurgent Germany, but in fact they were mainly designed to contain Soviet expansion in Europe. British and French leaders lied about the real purpose of these alliances because they did not want to antagonize the Soviet Union—which they saw as a serious threat—if they could avoid it.21
A fifth kind of inter-state lying is when a country attempts to affect the behavior of a rival state by threatening to attack it, even though it has no intention of actually starting a war. That empty threat might be designed to coerce an adversary into doing something it does not want to do. Germany’s behavior during the 1905–6 Moroccan Crisis is an instance of this kind of bluffing. German policymakers were determined to provoke a crisis with France over Morocco that would cause the breakup of the recently formed entente cordiale between Britain and France. They threatened war in pursuit of that goal, although “at no stage of the Moroccan affair,” as the historian Norman Rich writes, “was a military solution ever advocated or seriously contemplated by the German leaders.”22
This empty-threat strategy can also be employed to deter an adversary from pursuing a particular policy. For example, in August 1986 the Reagan administration