Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [40]
In the realm of high politics, where lying seems to be more frequent but still not commonplace, reputation does not matter much.7 Whenever an issue directly involves a country’s security, its leaders cannot afford to pay much attention to the reputation of other states, largely because they can never be sure that they will not be duped by a state with a good reputation. Just because a state has been honest ten times does not mean it will be honest the eleventh time. Being played for a sucker does not matter much when low politics are in play, but it could have disastrous consequences if a country’s survival is at stake. Thus, when leaders are dealing with issues that involve national security, they largely discount the past behavior of other states, which effectively means that a damaged reputation is usually not a serious price to pay for getting caught in a lie.
An inter-state lie can backfire in a second way. Specifically, the deceit can go undetected for a long enough time for the intended target to be bamboozled by the false story; nevertheless, the lie does not work as intended and leaves the country that told it worse off than it would have been had it not lied. In other words, a leader can successfully tell a misconceived lie. A good example of this phenomenon is Khrushchev’s lies about the Soviet missile force in the late 1950s. He greatly exaggerated Soviet capabilities to convince the United States not to threaten or attack the Soviet Union, and more generally to respect Moscow’s interests and wishes around the world. But instead, the alleged missile gap scared the United States and caused it to significantly escalate the arms race at a time when Khrushchev was hoping to slow it down so that Moscow could spend more money on economic and social programs. As this case shows, even well-told lies sometimes backfire because the policy that they underpin is badly flawed.
THE PERILS OF FEARMONGERING
Fearmongering—unlike the lies that leaders tell each other—is likely to have serious negative consequences for both a state’s internal politics and its foreign policy. To start, there is considerable potential for blowback. Leaders who engage in fear-mongering betray a certain contempt for their people and for democracy more generally. After all, they are lying because they do not think that their fellow citizens can be trusted to understand and support the right foreign policy, even if they are given a straightforward assessment of the threat environment. Trying to present the facts of the situation even more clearly and more forcefully will not work either. Therefore, to ensure that the country adopts the correct foreign policy, it is necessary to inflate the threat by deploying lies about the adversary and engaging in other forms of deception.
The problem with this kind of behavior is that the leadership’s low regard for the public is likely to spill over into the domestic realm. Once a country’s leaders conclude that its citizens do not understand important foreign policy issues and thus need to be manipulated, it is not much of a leap to apply the same sort of thinking to national issues. In essence, fearmongering makes it difficult to build a firewall between domestic and foreign policy, because the relationship between leaders and their people is basically the same in both domains. This is not to deny that the imperative to deceive is likely to be greater when foreign policy issues are on the table, because of the obvious link with the country’s security.
Fearmongering is also prone to backfiring and producing foreign-policy fiascos. The root of the problem is that the public debate about