Why Leaders Lie (13 page)

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 of outside experts oppose or are likely to oppose the policy in question. With the first scenario, however, there is at least a public debate where the leaders are forced to listen and respond to their critics’ concerns, including those of outside experts who know the issues well. That back-and-forth is likely to make those leaders think hard about their preferred course of action, which reduces the likelihood that they are just covering up a misguided policy. Moreover, they might come
to recognize certain problems with their preferred policy and modify it in smart ways. But in the second scenario, where there is hardly any public debate, the likelihood that a leader will recognize the flaws in his chosen policy is sharply reduced, and thus there is a greater possibility that it will go wrong.

Turning next to the other kind of strategic cover-up—hiding a failed policy—it might seem at first glance that backfiring is a moot issue, since the policy has already gone awry. But that conclusion would be wrong. Covering up a botched policy, which invariably entails protecting the responsible individuals and not firing them on the spot, is likely to mean that the failed policy—or some variant of it—will remain in place for a while, which is not a desirable outcome. For example, defending Marshal Joffre and his strategy for fighting the German army at Verdun meant that he and his flawed formula remained in place for the entire ten months of that bloody battle. France’s soldiers would have been better served if a more able commander had replaced Joffre early in that fight.

Furthermore, hiding botched policies can lead to further disasters down the road, not just because incompetents are usually kept in key leadership positions for at least some period of time, but also because engaging in cover-ups makes it difficult to have a national security system in which policymakers and military commanders are held accountable for their actions. No organization can work effectively without accountability at every level of the operation. Finally, if a botched policy is kept under tight wraps, it is difficult to have a meaningful discussion about what went wrong and how best to make sure that it does not happen again.

In sum, strategic cover-ups may sometimes be necessary, but they carry significant risks, because they have
considerable potential for backfiring as well as corrupting daily life on the home front.

Lying to help perpetrate national myths is unlikely to have harmful domestic or foreign-policy consequences. There is not much danger of blowback because most people are usually so taken with their nation’s myths that they do not recognize them for what they are. Instead, they see the myths as hallowed truths, not lies or distortions of the historical record. George Orwell captures the essence of this collective self-delusion when he writes, “Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakably certain of being in the right.”
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Even well-educated and otherwise sophisticated elites sometimes fall victim to this phenomenon; in effect, they end up believing their own lies, in which case they are no longer lies. As the scholar Richard Neustadt notes, “The tendency of bureaucratic language to create in private the same images presented to the public never should be underrated.”
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What about foreign policy? A number of prominent scholars, including Yale historian Paul Kennedy and Stephen Van Evera, maintain that nationalist myths sometimes lead states to behave foolishly.
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Indeed, these kinds of myths are said to cause countries to act aggressively toward their neighbors and to refuse to resolve conflicts that are otherwise amenable to a peaceful settlement. Nationalist myths, for example, are said to be a major cause of Germany’s aggressive behavior in the early part of the twentieth century—including starting World War I. Chauvinistic myths about Israel’s history are said to be one of the main reasons that Israelis will not
permit the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own, which makes it impossible to put an end to their longstanding conflict.

This perspective is wrong, however, because the causal arrow goes in the opposite direction: foreign policy behavior drives the creation of nationalist myths, not the other way around. Specifically, the rhetoric of nationalism is tailored to suit the behavior of states, which is driven largely by other calculations. For example, Germany’s aggressive behavior in the years leading up to World War I was driven mainly by concerns about the European balance of power, and the national myths that it deployed back then were largely designed to justify its belligerent actions.
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Israel’s efforts to control all of what was once called Mandatory Palestine and deny the Palestinians a state of their own has been a central part of the Zionist agenda since its inception in the late 1880s.
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Israel’s actions since its founding in 1948 have been largely consistent with that original Zionist vision, and have not been driven in any meaningful way by the various nationalist myths that Israelis have invented. The main purpose of those false stories has been to whitewash Israel’s brutal behavior toward the Palestinians, so that Israelis and their allies abroad think that Israel is always right and the Palestinians always wrong.

None of this is to deny that nationalism can be a potent cause of war. Indeed, it has been the most powerful ideology in the world over the past two centuries, and it has played a key role in tearing some states and empires apart, and has also led some countries to start wars with their neighbors. For example, Bismarck was motivated by nationalism as well as security concerns when he started and won wars in 1864, 1866, and 1870.
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His goal was not simply to expand Prussia’s borders and make it more secure, but also to create a unified German state. And remember that Zionism is effectively
Jewish nationalism, and there was no way that the Zionists coming from Europe could create a Jewish state in all of Palestine without behaving aggressively toward the people who were already living in the region. So nationalism is clearly a major cause of war, but the myths that accompany it are not. At most, they have a secondary or tertiary effect on the making of a country’s foreign policy.

Liberal lies also do not have a significant downside either at home or on the foreign-policy front. The same shared self-delusion that attends nationalist mythmaking tends to work here as well: most people do not recognize that lying is taking place, because they are inclined to believe that their own country almost always acts nobly. Thus, there is not much danger of blowback. But even in those rare instances when liberal lies do not work as intended and the public recognizes that their country has acted in an immoral or illegal way, there is not much danger of blowback, because most people understand that the rule book used in international politics is not the same one used inside their country’s borders.

The liberal lies that leaders tell also have little effect on how their country acts in the international arena. The same logic that underpins nationalist mythmaking applies here: statesmen and diplomats invariably do whatever they think is necessary to maximize their country’s security, regardless of what language they have employed to explain past and present actions. In other words, the causal arrow runs from foreign policy behavior to liberal rhetoric, not the other way around.

It is clear from the historical record that although lying is often condemned as shameful behavior, leaders of all kinds think that it is a useful tool of statecraft that can and should be employed in a variety of circumstances.

Leaders not only tell lies to other countries, they also lie to their own people, and they do so because they believe it is in the best interest of their country. And sometimes they are right. Who would argue that statesman and diplomats should not lie to a dangerous adversary—especially in wartime—if their deceptions deliver strategic benefits? Probably the best example of where lying played an important role in helping a country shift the balance of power in its favor was when Bismarck’s falsehoods helped cause France to start a war with Prussia in 1870. Prussia won a decisive victory, which led to the creation of a powerful Germany in the heart of Europe.

Moreover, it occasionally makes good sense for leaders to lie to their own people. It seems to me, for example, that President Kennedy was right to lie to the American people
about the deal he cut with the Soviets on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, since that lie helped settle the Cuban Missile Crisis and avert a possible war between the nuclear-armed superpowers.

Lying does not always work, however. It is difficult for leaders to snooker other states, because inter-state lies are usually directed at potential or real adversaries who are understandably suspicious of anything their opponents might say about matters relating to their security. This lack of trust between rival states explains in good part why there is not much lying between them. It was hard for someone like Churchill or Roosevelt to get away with lying to Hitler, or visa versa—and certainly not for long—because they were just too suspicious of each other. Although it is easier for a leader to lie to his public—because people tend to trust their own government—lying to fellow citizens does not always work either. For example, Roosevelt lied about the
Greer
incident in 1941 to help get the United States more deeply involved in World War II. But his lies had hardly any effect on the American public, which remained in an isolationist mood until Pearl Harbor.

Failure to hoodwink the intended target is not the only thing that can go wrong when leaders tell international lies. There is also the danger that their lies will be exposed and harm rather than help their country, as happened when the Eisenhower administration told a series of lies after the Soviet Union had shot down a U-2 spy plane. Of course, lies can backfire even if they are not exposed and are believed by the leaders of the target country. This is what happened when Khrushchev exaggerated the size of the Soviet ICBM arsenal in the late 1950s. He ended up fueling an arms race which he did not want and which was not in his country’s best interest. The Johnson administration’s lying about events in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 is another case where a well-told set of lies backfired. Those falsehoods played an important
role in getting the United States into the Vietnam War. Similarly, the Bush administration told various lies in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which were not exposed at the time and helped sell the case for toppling Saddam Hussein from power. In both of those cases, the fearmongering led to strategic disasters for the United States.

Backfiring is just one potential downside of international lying; the other is blowback, and it is the more worrisome of the two. Leaders who lie to their citizenry for what they believe are good strategic reasons might nevertheless do significant damage to their body politic by fostering a culture of dishonesty. This is why fearmongering and strategic cover-ups are the most dangerous kinds of lies that leaders can tell. Both carry a risk of blowback because they involve leaders lying to their publics, and both are also prone to producing foreign-policy debacles. The potential costs associated with the other three kinds of international lies—nationalist mythmaking, liberal lies, and inter-state lies—are not nearly as great as with fearmongering and strategic cover-ups.

What lessons can we draw for future American foreign policy from this examination of international lying? The United States emerged from the Cold War as the most powerful state in the world. That situation is not likely to change in the foreseeable future, as there is only one state—China—that could challenge America’s position of primacy. But China has a long way to go before it catches up, and it has problems that may slow or even halt its climb to the top.
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At the same time, a large portion of the American foreign-policy establishment—including Democrats and Republicans—believes that the United States has a moral as well as strategic responsibility not only to police the entire globe, but to try to shape the politics of individual countries. Moreover, American leaders have not been shy about using military force to achieve their grand goals. The United States has fought five
wars since the Cold War ended in 1989, and it has been at war for fourteen of the subsequent twenty-two years: 1991 against Iraq; 1995 and 1999 against Sebia; 2001–2002 against Afghanistan; 2003–2011 against both Afghanistan and Iraq.