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By Root 3111 0

the threat environment cannot help but be distorted, since the leaders are purposely deceiving their people about the dangers facing their country. In essence, they do not think that an honest threat assessment is enough to get the public to do the right thing. Of course, there may be circumstances where the public is an obstacle to dealing effectively with a serious threat, and thus it makes good strategic sense for leaders to engage in fearmongering. Indeed, a good case can be made that Roosevelt’s lying about the Greer incident in 1941 was in the national interest, because the American people did not fully appreciate the danger that Nazi Germany presented to the United States.8

But it is also possible—maybe even likely—that the public is basically intelligent and responsible, and the reason that government leaders are having difficulty making their case is that they are misreading the threat and pushing a misguided policy. This outcome is especially likely if the government is facing substantial opposition from outside experts as well as the broader population. It seems likely that leaders offering sound arguments would be able to defend them in the marketplace of ideas—most of the time anyway—and not have to lie to the public, especially those experts who know the issue at hand. The fact that a leader feels compelled to fearmonger means that there is a good chance he is misreading the threat environment and that the public has gauged it correctly. If that is the case, and the government ends up pursuing a misguided policy, it will almost certainly lead to serious trouble.

Furthermore, if leaders lie in the service of promoting a flawed policy, they are likely to lose popular support when the public discovers that it has been misled, compounding the country’s troubles. This is what happened to the Johnson administration during the Vietnam War and the Bush administration during the Iraq war. In each case, it became apparent when the war was going badly that there had been serious deception in the run-up to the conflict. Nevertheless, if statesmen and diplomats are found out to have lied about a policy that clearly achieves its aims, the public is unlikely to punish them, simply because nothing succeeds like success in international politics. Of course, that logic helps convince policymakers in the first place that they can get away with fearmongering.

THE HAZARDS OF STRATEGIC COVER-UPS

Strategic cover-ups can also lead to serious trouble both at home and abroad. Leaders who lie to their own citizens about either failed or contentious policies obviously think that their people are unable to deal intelligently with those matters. As with fearmongering, that situation is naturally ripe for blowback, because policymakers who hold such views can easily slide into thinking that the public is incapable of dealing intelligently with important domestic issues as well, which would open the floodgates for lying on the home front. That outcome would surely have regrettable consequences for any body politic.

How trouble might occur in the foreign policy realm depends on the type of cover-up and how it plays out. Let us first consider how concealing a controversial policy might backfire. A leader might decide to surreptitiously adopt a particular policy after an open and contentious public debate leads him to conclude that the policy in question is good for the country, even though it is deeply unpopular with a substantial portion of the citizenry. Alternatively, a leader might feel compelled to secretly adopt a policy before it is vigorously debated in public, simply because he anticipates that it would encounter serious opposition. In both scenarios, the leader would have to lie if he were asked whether the shrouded policy had been adopted.

There is serious potential for backfire with cover-ups of this sort, because whenever leaders cannot sell a policy to their public in a rational-legal manner, there is a good chance that the problem is with the policy, not the audience. This is especially true if a substantial number