Why Leaders Lie (5 page)

For starters, basic realist logic explains why it is difficult for leaders to get away with lying to other countries when important strategic issues are at stake. States operating in an anarchic system have powerful incentives to sometimes act in ruthless and deceitful ways to ensure their survival, and this repertoire of possible tactics surely includes lying. Former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir captured this point when he said, “For the sake of the Land of Israel it’s all right to lie.”
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Not surprisingly, almost all leaders, and even many of their citizens, recognize that international relations are governed in large part by a different set of rules than those which govern daily life inside their country. Thus, when it comes to important matters of state, they are unlikely to trust pronouncements by another government unless they can verify them.
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As former president Ronald Reagan famously warned, “Trust, but verify.” No Western leader, for example, is going to accept Iran’s claim that it is not developing nuclear weapons and leave the issue there. Instead, they will insist that the International Atomic Energy Agency be able
to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities to make sure that it is not trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

The problem is especially acute when assessing another country’s intentions, which are difficult to determine with a high degree of confidence. It is much easier, although not necessarily easy, to count and assess another country’s military capabilities, which are tangible assets that can be seen by the naked eye. Intentions, on the other hand, are ultimately in the minds of policymakers, making them impossible to observe and measure, which ultimately works to diminish trust between states. Given this general lack of trust, it is difficult for leaders to get away with lying to each other when the stakes are high. Thus it is not surprising that the historical record contains hardly any examples of devastatingly effective inter-state lies.

Statesmen and diplomats are more likely to trust each other when they are dealing with issues where there would be no major strategic consequences if either side fell for a lie. In other words, leaders are usually less likely to worry about being deceived when the issue at hand involves economics or the environment—“low politics”—as opposed to national security—“high politics”—where trust is scarce.
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One might think that there would be a significant amount of lying when low politics are at play, because leaders are likely to be more trusting and thus more vulnerable to being duped. But that is not the case; there is not much inter-state lying even when the stakes are relatively low.

One reason why there is not much lying when low politics are at play is that the gains from deceiving another country are likely to be small. Of course, that is why the potential victim is vulnerable to lying: the stakes are low and thus the costs of being bamboozled are not great, so the victim lets his guard down. Another reason is that if statesmen were inveterate liars, nobody would believe anything they said,
which would rob lying of its effect. Lying is only effective when the potential victim thinks that the liar is probably telling the truth. Thus, there has to be good reason for leaders to think that they are not being misled, which means that they cannot lie to each other too often without rendering lying ineffective. In short, inter-state lying must be done selectively and carefully to be useful.

A final reason is that if leaders often lied to each other, it would be almost impossible for them to interact in constructive ways, since nobody would know what to think was true or false. And if a particular leader frequently lied, he would surely get a reputation for dishonesty, and other leaders would be reluctant to reach future agreements with him, which might seriously hurt his country. This is especially true when dealing with economic and environmental issues where there is the promise of continued cooperation in the years ahead. Too much lying, in other words, is bad for business.

All of this is to say that lying has its limits as a tool of statecraft.

The main reason that leaders lie to foreign audiences is to gain a strategic advantage for their country. Because states operate in an anarchic world, where there is no night watchman to protect them in case of serious trouble, they have no choice but to provide for their own security. The best way that states can maximize their prospects for survival is to gain power at their rivals’ expense. However, they can also use deception, which includes lying, to achieve an advantage over a potential adversary. In a dangerous world, leaders do what they must to insure their country’s survival. Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public
affairs during the Kennedy administration, captured this point when he said, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, “I think the inherent right of the Government to lie to save itself when faced with nuclear disaster is basic.”
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Some twenty years later, President Jimmy Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, remarked, “But Sylvester, of course, was right. In certain circumstances, government not only has the right but a positive obligation to lie.”
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In practice, inter-state lying takes different forms and operates according to different logics. Let us consider some of the ways in which states lie to each other. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, although most inter-state lies would fit into one of these categories.

First, leaders sometimes exaggerate their state’s capabilities for purposes of deterring an adversary, or maybe even coercing it. For example, Hitler lied about German military capabilities during the 1930s. He tried to inflate the Wehrmacht’s strength so as to discourage Britain and France from interfering with German rearmament as well as his aggressive foreign policy moves, like the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936.
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In roughly the same period, Josef Stalin’s infamous purges did serious damage to the fighting power of the Red Army. Worried that this might make the Soviet Union look weak and invite an attack from Nazi Germany, Stalin and his lieutenants put out the word that the Soviet military was a formidable fighting force, when they knew it was not.
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Another instance of this kind of inter-state lying occurred during the Cold War, after the Soviets launched the first-ever intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in October 1957.
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The strategic nuclear balance at the time clearly favored the United States. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev took advantage of his country’s early lead in ICBMs to claim that the Soviet Union had an ICBM capability that
was far greater than what they actually had. Khrushchev’s lying over the next three years contributed to the famous myth of the “missile gap,” in which the United States was thought to be at a serious disadvantage in terms of strategic missiles. In fact, the opposite was true: the Soviet Union had far fewer ICBMs than the United States. Khrushchev’s reason for exaggerating Soviet capabilities was to deter as well as coerce the United States. In particular, he wanted to make sure that the Americans did not launch a strategic nuclear strike against the Soviet Union in a crisis. He was also determined to put great pressure on the Eisenhower administration to abandon its plans to allow Germany to acquire nuclear weapons.

A second kind of inter-state lie is when a leader tells falsehoods for the purpose of minimizing the importance of a particular military capability, or even hiding it from rival countries. The deceiver’s aim might be to avoid provoking an attack aimed at destroying that capability, or to prevent another state from forcing it to give up that capability. For example, after Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz became the head of the German navy in June 1897, he set out to build a fleet that could challenge British naval supremacy and allow Germany to pursue its ambitious
Weltpolitik
.
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He realized, however, that the German Navy would be vulnerable to a British attack in the early stages of its development; he referred to this as “the danger zone.” To prevent that outcome, he and other German leaders launched a propaganda campaign in which they falsely claimed that Berlin was building a fleet for defensive purposes—to protect Germany’s growing overseas trade—and that they had no intention of challenging the British navy.

Israel lied to the United States in the 1960s about its nascent nuclear weapons program because it feared that Washington would force the Jewish state to shut down the project if it acknowledged what was really going on at the
Dimona nuclear complex. “This is one program,” Henry Kissinger wrote in 1969, “on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us.”
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Another case in point was when the Soviets placed offensive missiles in Cuba in 1963 after they had repeatedly assured the Kennedy administration that they would not take that dangerous step. Their hope was to present the president “with a fait accompli at some moment of Khrushchev’s choice,” without giving Kennedy reason to move against them before the missiles were installed.
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A state might also downplay or hide its military capabilities to minimize the chances that an adversary would counter them either by altering its strategy, building defenses, or racing to build more of the same kind of weapons. During World War I, for example, Britain secretly developed the tank to help break the stalemate on the Western Front. To help conceal that weapon from the Germans before it was used against them on the battlefield, British leaders told a series of lies. For example, they said it was a water tank designed to transport water to the front lines, not an armored fighting machine or a “landship,” which was the name they used behind closed doors; this is how the tank got its name. They also said that the manufacturing firm building the tanks was not involved in making armaments. Moreover, the British tried to make it appear during the manufacturing process that the tanks were headed for Russia, not the Western Front. Each machine “carried the legend ‘With Care to Petrograd’ in Russian letters 12 inches high.”
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This same logic was also at play in Moscow’s handling of its biological weapons during the last fifteen years of the Cold War.
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Despite signing the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention, which went into effect in March 1975, the Soviets violated that treaty by developing a massive biological weapons program. They did not simply conceal the program from the outside world, but lied about it as well.
Moscow’s lying was most prominently on display in 1979, after about one hundred people died near Sverdlovsk after becoming infected with anthrax accidentally released from a biological weapons facility. The Soviets, hoping to avoid getting caught violating the convention, falsely claimed that the deaths were caused by contaminated meat. The ultimate goal in this case and the others described here is to surreptitiously gain and maintain a military advantage over rival states.

Third, a country’s leaders might downplay their hostile intentions toward another state to disguise an attack on it. Probably the best example of this phenomenon is Hitler’s efforts between 1933 and 1938 to convince the other European powers that he was committed to peace, when he was actually bent on war. “If it rests with Germany,” he said in August 1934, “war will not come again. This country has a more profound impression than any other of the evil that war causes.… In our belief Germany’s present-day problems cannot be settled by war.”
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And in a famous speech in the Berlin Sportpalast during the tension filled days just before the infamous Munich agreement was signed, he boldly stated that his desire to acquire the Sudetenland for Germany “is the last territorial claim which I will have to make in Europe.”
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Both statements were obvious lies.

Another example of this kind of behavior involves Japan and the Soviet Union in the last year of World War II. They had a neutrality pact throughout most of World War II, but at Yalta in February 1945, Stalin promised Churchill and Roosevelt that the Red Army would attack Japan within three months after Nazi Germany was defeated. Japanese leaders suspected that such a deal had been made at Yalta and queried their Soviet counterparts, who replied that their relationship had not changed at all and was “developing normally on the basis” of the neutrality pact.
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The Soviets attacked Japan on August 8, 1945.

Sometimes leaders bent on concealing an aggressive action against another country are forced to lie about it when reporters at home start asking probing questions about the impending operation. Those lies, however, are ultimately aimed at the country that is being targeted, not the leaders’ own citizens. During the 1960 presidential campaign, for example, John F. Kennedy—the Democratic Party’s candidate—argued that the United States should help anti-Castro forces overthrow the Cuban leader.
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His opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, knew that the government was deeply involved in just such a scheme. But he also understood that he ran the risk of exposing the operation if he agreed with Kennedy. So he lambasted his opponent’s proposal—calling it “probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendation that he’s made during the course of the campaign”—even though he thought it was a smart idea and had fought for that policy inside the government. Nixon was lying to deceive Castro, not the American people. Indeed, he only wished he could tell them the truth.

President Jimmy Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, was put in a similar situation in April 1980, when a reporter asked him whether it was true that the United States was planning to launch a military operation to free the American hostages then being held in Iran. Although it was true, Powell felt that he had no choice but to lie and say it was not true, because otherwise he would have tipped off the Iranian government about the forthcoming rescue attempt.
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So he reluctantly deceived the reporter.