Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [26]
A good example of this kind of thinking in action was the way the Truman administration attempted to sell a major increase in defense spending to the American people in the spring of 1950.48 The president and his senior foreign-policy advisors believed that the broader public would not fully support the proposed buildup, and therefore it would be necessary to initiate a “psychological scare campaign.” Of course, when policymakers take a country down this road, they will inevitably face pressure to tell lies to scare their people enough that they enthusiastically back the government’s planned policies.
It is much harder to argue that educated elites who dispute the seriousness of a threat are either ignorant or dim-witted. This is especially true when you are dealing with experts on the issue at hand. It might be the case, however, that those educated and interested dissenters are perceived to have a wishy-washy view of international politics, and therefore some threat inflation is necessary to stiffen their backbones. It might also be the case that they are simply misreading the available evidence about the danger facing their country and drawing overly optimistic conclusions about the threat environment. If leaders cannot solve this problem by providing the misguided dissenters with more detailed information, the only solution left is fearmongering.
Bamboozling those recalcitrant elites is unlikely to work, however, because those dissenters are by definition knowledgeable about the issue at hand and thus hard to fool. An alternative approach, which is more likely to work, is to use fearmongering to mobilize the broader public in ways that make it suspicious, if not hostile, to those stubborn experts. They would then be isolated and feel suspect, and maybe even worried about their careers, which would make them more likely to temper their criticisms or remain silent, or maybe even shift gears and support the government’s policy. Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, candidly acknowledged that this kind of fear caused him to support the 2003 Iraq war: “My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”49
There is an alternative explanation for why leaders sometimes turn to fearmongering that is less contemptuous of the public. It is possible that a country’s political system might be prone to paralysis and thus unable to respond in a timely manner to a serious threat. The fledgling American government under the Articles of Confederation certainly fits this description, and some even argue that the system of checks and balances set up under the Constitution is not conducive to recognizing and dealing with external threats in a timely manner.50 Leaders will have powerful incentives to fearmonger when the governmental machinery is sclerotic, because rousing the people might be the only way to force the political system into action to meet the looming danger.
It is reasonably easy for policymakers to lie to their publics. For starters, they control the state’s intelligence apparatus, which gives them access to important information that the public does not have and cannot get, at least in the short term. Policymakers, therefore, can manipulate the flow of information to the public in various ways, and most people will be inclined to trust what their leaders tell them unless there is hard evidence that they are being deceived. Furthermore, the head of a country can use the bully pulpit to manipulate the discourse about foreign policy in different