Why Leaders Lie (12 page)

Furthermore, promiscuous lying can undermine the rule of law, which is at the heart of democratic life. Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who indicted White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby in October 2006 for lying about his role in revealing the identity of a CIA aide, put the point well when he said: “The truth is the engine of our judicial system. And if you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost.”
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Of course, laws exist in part to punish lying, which means that some modicum of dishonesty is expected in any society. But lying cannot be widespread; there has to be a substantial amount of honesty and trust in public life for any legal system to work effectively. Consider, for example, that George Ryan, the former governor of Illinois, who initially favored capital punishment, felt that he had to suspend all executions in his state because there was convincing evidence that many of the inmates on death row were convicted on the basis of lies and other improprieties.
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Finally, if lying is pervasive in a democracy, it might alienate the public to the point where it loses faith in democratic government and is willing to countenance some form of authoritarian rule. After all, it is hard to see how a democracy can remain viable for long if the people have no respect for their leaders, because they think they are a bunch of liars,
and no respect for their institutions, because they think that they are deeply corrupt. In short, too much lying can do serious damage to any body politic.

Switching gears, how might international lying adversely affect a country’s foreign policy? As emphasized, leaders lie to each other and to their own people because they believe that doing so serves the national interest. And the sad fact is that lying sometimes does make good strategic sense. If it did not, there would be no good justification for the various kinds of lies described in the previous chapters. Nevertheless, lying occasionally backfires, in which case a country might end up worse off rather than better off for having told a particular lie. Hence, the key question for assessing the ramifications of international lying is: which types of lies are most likely to backfire and have harmful strategic consequences?

In sum, the
potential for blowback
is the main criterion for assessing the consequences of international lying on the home front, while the
potential for backfiring
and doing a state more harm than good is the paramount criterion in the foreign-policy realm.

Inter-state lying is unlikely to cause serious trouble at home. The danger of blowback is minimal in part because leaders do not lie to each other very often. The main reason, however, is that most people understand that the rulebook for international politics is different from the one used in domestic politics. In particular, they understand that leaders sometimes have to lie and cheat in their dealings with other countries, especially when they are dealing with a dangerous adversary. For better or for worse, lying is widely accepted as a necessary, albeit distasteful, tool of foreign policy. This is why statesmen and diplomats are rarely punished when
they get caught telling inter-state lies. In contrast, lying is generally considered to be wrong when the issue at hand is national in scope, mainly because a country’s survival is seldom at stake when domestic politics are at play.

It might seem unrealistic to think that inter-state lying can be compartmentalized the way I describe it without encouraging or legitimizing lying on the home front. But that would be wrong; reasonably clear boundaries can be drawn that stipulate when lying is acceptable and when it is not. Remember that most of us accept the fact that there are exceptional circumstances where we are allowed to lie in our daily lives without that becoming accepted behavior in ordinary circumstances. For example, when I was a cadet at West Point in the late 1960s, there was a strict honor code, which emphatically stated that a cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do. Nevertheless, we were allowed to tell white lies—it was called “social honor”—in instances where we might hurt someone else’s feelings over a trivial matter. To cite a popular example from the time: if you went to your tactical officer’s home and his wife served a dreadful meal, it was acceptable to tell her that the meal was delicious. We clearly understood, however, that telling lies in awkward social situations like that one did not give us license to lie in other circumstances.

As noted, the same logic applies to people bargaining over a house or car. They are allowed to lie about their reservation price—it is part of the game—but that does not mean that they are free to lie in their other matters. Inter-state politics is another well-defined domain where lying is generally considered acceptable, and where there is not much danger of spillover or blowback.

Turning to the international consequences, there is no doubt that inter-state lying can backfire, just as any policy a state pursues can fail and harm the national interest. But there
is nothing special about this particular kind of international lie that makes it prone to backfiring, as I will argue is the case with fearmongering and strategic cover-ups. Moreover, the damage done when inter-state lying goes awry is usually not major, which is not to deny that there are some costs.

A lie that a statesman or diplomat tells to another country can go wrong in two different ways. First, it might be exposed soon after it is told, which would obviously make it impossible for the lie to have its intended effect. But what about the consequences for the leaders who lied? They are unlikely to be severe because the incentive to retaliate would not be great, since the lie was uncovered before it could do harm to the target country, and since there are usually not good ways for the intended victim to punish the liars. One possible option is to embarrass the liar, but that is a minor punishment indeed. And that sanction is not even likely to work well, since most people understand that leaders sometimes lie to each other for the good of their countries. It is hard to shame a leader with that motive, even if he botches the job and gets caught red-handed.

The target state might retaliate by ending ongoing negotiations or pursuing hard-line policies against the country that tried to dupe it. In that case, the exposed lie would seriously worsen relations between the involved countries. However, this is unlikely to happen, not only because the lie was exposed and failed to harm the intended target, but also because—as I have emphasized repeatedly—it is taken for granted that states lie to each other. There is no question that an unmasked lie could contribute to the deterioration of relations between two states, but it is highly unlikely that it would be the main driving force, which would almost certainly be some significant economic or political dispute between them.

A case of backfiring that fits this profile occurred when the Eisenhower administration was caught telling a handful
of blatant lies about the U-2 incident in the spring of 1960.
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The president himself felt humiliated when those lies were revealed, but more importantly, he was preparing at the time to meet with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. Both leaders were hoping to improve relations between the superpowers and slow down the nuclear arms race. But the planned summit was scuttled, in part because of the administration’s lies about the plane’s mission. The main reason it failed, however, was that the incident revealed to the world that the United States was violating Soviet airspace and operating spy planes over the Soviet Union, which caused Khrushchev significant political problems at home and made it difficult for him to meet and cooperate with Eisenhower. In short, the lies that the president and his advisors told to Moscow mattered, but not that much.

One might argue that getting caught telling a lie hurts a state’s reputation, which can cause serious damage to its international position. As noted, reputation is important in the realm of low politics.
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If a country made a practice of telling lies when dealing with economic and mundane political issues, it would quickly develop a reputation for dishonesty, which would discourage other countries from interacting and cooperating with it. But this is one reason why there is little inter-state lying when low politics are involved, which, of course, renders the reputation issue of little practical significance in this domain.

In the realm of high politics, where lying seems to be more frequent but still not commonplace, reputation does not matter much.
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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.

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 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.
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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.