Why Leaders Lie (4 page)

To reinforce the point that lying is considered shameful because it is so difficult to detect, let us look at one of the few realms in our daily life where it is acceptable to lie: commercial negotiations where buyers and sellers are trying to reach a price agreement. Consider, for example, a case in which two individuals are bargaining over a commodity like a car or a house. Each person is allowed to lie about his “reservation price,” which is the price above or below which he would no longer agree to a deal. Both the buyer and the seller understand that lying—the euphemism is “bluffing”—is part of the game; thus neither side gains an unfair advantage when it lies about the selling price or the purchase price. In essence, we are talking about a fair fight in which neither side can claim that it was wrongly bamboozled by the other side.

Not surprisingly, there is hardly any stigma attached to lying about one’s reservation price in business dealings. Indeed, one might argue that this kind of bluffing is not lying, because, to quote the British statesman Henry Taylor, a “falsehood ceases to be a falsehood when it is understood on all sides that the truth is not expected to be spoken.”
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I reject that logic, however, because both the buyer and seller are telling falsehoods that are intended to deceive the other side, which is the essence of lying.

In sum, lying, spinning, and withholding information are all forms of deception, and all three can be contrasted with truth telling. The subsequent discussion focuses on how lies are used to deceive others in the foreign-policy realm. But in practice, deception campaigns invariably involve spinning and concealment as well as lying. In fact, given the opprobrium attached to most kinds of lying, leaders who think that they have good reason to deceive another state or their own public usually prefer spinning and concealment to lying. Nobody wants to be called a liar, even if it is for a good cause. This preference is reinforced by the fact that it is often difficult to lie without getting caught red-handed. Of course, leaders sometimes conclude that they have no choice but to lie for their countries and that circumstances make it feasible to do so. In general, however, lying will be the option of last resort for leaders seeking to deceive another country.

Let us now consider the various kinds of lies that are told in international politics.

In the foreign policy realm, leaders can tell seven different kinds of lies. Each type serves a specific purpose, although a single lie can serve multiple purposes. For example, a lie that a leader tells his people about a foreign threat to generate public support for countering it (fearmongering) might also help foster nationalism on the home front by portraying the adversary in an especially harsh light (nationalist mythmaking). This particular kind of lie is aimed at the policymaker’s own public, but lies can also be beamed at rival states as well as allies. However, a lie directed at any one of these audiences will invariably reach the others, which might have positive or negative consequences.

Inter-state lies
are aimed directly at other countries either for the purpose of gaining a strategic advantage over them or preventing them from gaining an advantage at your expense. This type of lie is usually directed at rival states, but states sometimes lie to their allies. Leaders engaged in inter-state lying usually end up deceiving their own people, although they are not the intended audience.

Fearmongering
occurs when a leader lies to his own people about a foreign-policy threat that he believes they do not recognize or fully appreciate. The aim is to motivate the public to take the threat seriously and make the necessary sacrifices to counter it. Leaders do not fearmonger because they are evil or because they are pursuing selfish gains, but because they believe that inflating a particular threat serves the national interest.

Strategic cover-ups
are lies designed to hide either failed policies or controversial policies from the public and sometimes from other states as well. Leaders do not tell these lies to protect incompetents who bungled their job or to conceal foolish policies—although that can be an unintended consequence. The aim instead is to protect the country from harm. For example, lying to the public about military incompetence in wartime is sometimes important for maintaining solidarity on the home front, which can mean the difference between defeat and victory.

Nationalist mythmaking
is when leaders tell lies, mainly to their own people, about their country’s past.
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In essence, they tell a story in which “we” are always right and “they” are always wrong. Elites do this by denying that their nation or ethnic group has done things it has actually done or by falsely claiming that it has done certain things it has not done. Of course, those elites tell a similar set of lies about rival groups. The purpose is to create a powerful sense of group identity among the broader population, because that is necessary for building and maintaining a viable nation-state, and for motivating people to fight wars for their homeland. These myths sometimes help states gain legitimacy with other states.

Liberal lies
are designed to cover up the behavior of states when it contradicts the well-developed body of liberal norms that is widely accepted around the world and
codified in international law. Countries of all kinds, including liberal democracies, sometimes act brutally toward other states, or form alliances with particularly odious states. When that happens, a state’s leaders will usually invent a story for their people—or the wider world—that tries to disguise their illiberal actions with idealistic rhetoric.

Social imperialism
occurs when leaders tell lies about another country for the purpose of promoting either their own economic or political interests or those of a particular social class or interest group. The aim is to divert the public’s attention from problems or controversies on the home front in ways that will benefit a narrow slice of society, not the general welfare. For example, leaders might try to solidify their hold on power by exaggerating a threat and creating fear on the home front, which, in turn, will lead the public to rally around the regime.

Ignoble cover-ups
are when leaders lie about their blunders or unsuccessful policies for self-serving reasons. Their main aim is to protect themselves or their friends from well-deserved punishment.
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This kind of lie is not designed to benefit the wider public, which is the main purpose of a strategic cover-up. Nevertheless, because strategic cover-ups usually end up protecting the incompetent, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between these two kinds of cover-ups.

These seven varieties of falsehoods largely encompass the universe of international lies.
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However, the subsequent discussion concentrates on lies that are told in the service of the national interest. These strategic lies benefit the collectivity, unlike selfish lies, which benefit a particular individual or group of individuals. In practice, this means that there will be no further discussion of either social imperialism or ignoble cover-ups.

These two types of falsehoods are omitted because there is no good strategic justification for them. Of course, we
know why individuals tell lies of this sort, but hardly anyone would argue that they are legitimate forms of behavior. Indeed, most observers would condemn these selfish lies, not only because they have a corrupting influence on political life, but also because they jeopardize the broader national interest. In short, social imperialism and ignoble cover-ups have no redeeming social value.

Strategic lies are a different matter. They aim to facilitate the general welfare and they usually have at least a modicum of legitimacy. In essence, strategic lies can do good things for a country, although there is always the possibility that they will do more harm than good. The focus here is on the five kinds of strategic falsehoods described above: inter-state lies, fearmongering, strategic cover-ups, nationalist mythmaking, and liberal lies. In addition to describing each type in greater detail, I will lay out the underlying causal logics and explain when each is more or less likely to occur. In other words, I will explain why and when you get these different kinds of international lies.

Sir Henry Wotton, the seventeenth-century British diplomat, once remarked that an ambassador is “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”
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This comment nicely captures the fact that states do lie to each other, because they think that lying serves the national interest. Wotton’s remark, however, is misleading in the sense that it implies that diplomats and statesmen routinely spend their time lying to each other. In fact, political leaders and their diplomatic representatives tell each other the truth far more often than they lie. Even when they are bent on deceiving one another, they are more likely to rely on concealment rather than overt lying. Secrecy, as virtually all students of international politics know well, is a time-honored approach to developing weapons and strategies that can give one country an advantage over its rivals.

On what basis do I make these claims? As noted, I am not testing my arguments by systematically examining them in light of the historical record. In fact, I am not sure that
it is possible to measure how often statesmen and diplomats have lied to each other in the past as compared to how often they have been truthful with each other. One reason is that over past centuries there have a vast number of interactions among the leaders of the different political units that have comprised the international system. It is difficult to see how one could select a representative sample of cases from that immense database. But even if that were feasible, it would still be impossible to investigate what transpired in many of those cases. We have only sparse records of what happened in the distant past, and even in more recent cases, the records are sometimes incomplete. For these same reasons, it would also be especially difficult—maybe impossible—to determine precisely how much inter-state lying has gone on as opposed to concealing and spinning.

My claim that there has not been much inter-state lying over time is based on two considerations. First, I had difficulty finding examples of leaders lying to each other, although I certainly found some cases, most of which are discussed below. I also asked other scholars who are well versed in international history if they could provide me with examples of statesmen and diplomats lying to one another. Their initial reaction—like mine—was that there must be an abundance of such cases; but in the end virtually everyone I approached had trouble finding more than a few clear-cut cases of inter-state lying.

Of course, one’s definition of lying affects any assessment of how much lying there has been among states, or any other kind of lying, for that matter. Sissela Bok, for example, notes in her important treatise on lying that some people define the concept of lying so broadly that they “take all forms of deception to be lies, regardless of whether or not they involve statements of any kind.” When this expansive definition is employed, people can then say that lying is rampant
in daily life, and “that the average person lies ten, twenty, a hundred times a day.”
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If applied to international politics, this definition of lying would include spinning and concealment, as well as consciously telling a deliberate untruth, and one could therefore say that inter-state lying was commonplace. But if one defines lying more narrowly, as Bok and I do, it is not nearly as widespread, although it is surely not unknown. I believe a narrower definition makes more sense, because it allows us to discriminate between different forms of deception and to theorize about when and why each may be employed.

One might argue that statesmen and diplomats who lie to each other are not going to admit it, and indeed are likely to go to some lengths to hide it. Perhaps there are numerous cases of inter-state lying, but I have failed to uncover most of them because they are well-hidden from those who were not involved in the decision-making process. This line of argument certainly has some merit when analyzing contemporary events, since important information is almost always concealed from the public, and it is therefore hard for outsiders to know what transpired behind closed doors. Also, the further back in history we go, the more incomplete the records are about the policymaking process in virtually every country, which means that inter-state lying might have been commonplace long ago, but we cannot expose it. There are even some recent cases where the historical record is spotty, which again raises the possibility of deeply buried lies.

Still, I do not think there are many well-concealed interstate lies lurking in the past. I base this claim on the fact that we do have plenty of information on many important foreign-policy decisions made over the past two centuries by a variety of countries, which would make it difficult for leaders to hide their lies so well that they would never be discovered. This would be especially true for lies that had a
major impact on a country’s foreign policy. After all, a deliberate deception campaign usually involves many people, and at least some of them are bound to talk eventually. Plus, the written records, which are extensive in many of these cases, have now come to light. Thus, most of the key details of many recent historical events have become public—including the lies. This is not to deny that a few well-told lies from the past might have escaped detection, but it is hard to imagine that there are many such cases.

There is a second reason why I think that inter-state lying has been uncommon: it is usually difficult to bamboozle another country’s leaders. Even when it is feasible, the costs of lying often outweigh the benefits. In other words, there are compelling reasons why we should not expect lying among states to be commonplace.