Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [28]
Neoconservative thinking about the broader public’s inability to handle truth is captured in the following comment by Irving Kristol, one of the founding fathers of that movement: “There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”54 This perspective, however, is not restricted to conservatives, as is evident from reading The Phantom Public by Walter Lippmann, who was not a man of the right.55
This kind of behavior may be more prevalent in democracies, but it is not limited to them, because in the age of nationalism, even the leaders of nondemocratic countries pay attention to public opinion. Hitler, for example, closely monitored the German people’s thinking about all kinds of issues, and went to great lengths to ensure that his policies enjoyed widespread public support. His regime, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, was “acutely aware of the need to manufacture consensus.”56 Nevertheless, the more autocratic or the more firm the autocrat’s grip on his society, the less likely the need for fearmongering.
Geography also influences the likelihood of fearmongering. States that share a border with a menacing adversary usually have little need to exaggerate that threat, mainly because it resides next door and is in easy striking distance. In such cases, the public is likely to recognize and fear its next-door neighbor. On the other hand, countries that do not share a border with a dangerous opponent are more likely to have cause to rely on fearmongering. A distant enemy is likely to appear less frightening than a nearby enemy and thus give leaders reason to inflate the threat. States separated from their main adversaries and allies by large bodies of water—I call these states offshore balancers—are especially prone to fearmongering, because water is a formidable defensive barrier.57
Comparing the amount of threat inflation in each of the major powers during World War I illustrates how geography influences the rhetoric that leaders employ to describe their adversaries. There was much less fearmongering about the German threat in France and Russia than there was in Britain and the United States. This is hardly surprising, since the two Anglo-Saxon countries are offshore balancers; in contrast, France and Russia not only shared a border with the Kaiserreich, but they were also fighting the German army on their own territory. Germany itself had little need to threat-inflate during the war, since it was fighting against adversaries located on both its eastern and western borders.
Finally, leaders promoting wars of choice—especially preventive wars—are likely to engage in fearmongering. It is difficult to motivate the public to support a preventive war, which is when one country attacks another that is not an imminent threat to it at that time, but might be sometime in the future. Because the threat is not serious at the moment, the public’s sense of danger is unlikely to be high. Moreover, given the difficulty of predicting the future, many citizens are likely to think that the threat might not ever materialize for one reason or another. Preventive wars are also prohibited by international law as well as just-war theory, which make them a hard sell in many countries around the world. For these reasons, many people—including experts—will want to adopt a “wait and see” policy, and hope that trouble never shows up. To counter this foot dragging, the advocates of war will fearmonger to create the impression that the country is facing an immediate threat and that they are advocating preemptive war, which is when a country attacks an adversary that is about to attack it. Preemptive