Why Leaders Lie (6 page)

Fourth, a state might lie to downplay its hostile intentions toward a rival state, not to facilitate an attack, but to avoid needlessly provoking that rival. This logic was in evidence during the early days of the Cold War, when the countries of Western Europe created two mutual defense pacts: the Treaty of Dunkirk (1947) and the Treaty of Brussels (1948).
Both agreements were said to be checks against a resurgent Germany, but in fact they were mainly designed to contain Soviet expansion in Europe. British and French leaders lied about the real purpose of these alliances because they did not want to antagonize the Soviet Union—which they saw as a serious threat—if they could avoid it.
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A fifth kind of inter-state lying is when a country attempts to affect the behavior of a rival state by threatening to attack it, even though it has no intention of actually starting a war. That empty threat might be designed to coerce an adversary into doing something it does not want to do. Germany’s behavior during the 1905–6 Moroccan Crisis is an instance of this kind of bluffing. German policymakers were determined to provoke a crisis with France over Morocco that would cause the breakup of the recently formed
entente cordiale
between Britain and France. They threatened war in pursuit of that goal, although “at no stage of the Moroccan affair,” as the historian Norman Rich writes, “was a military solution ever advocated or seriously contemplated by the German leaders.”
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This empty-threat strategy can also be employed to deter an adversary from pursuing a particular policy. For example, in August 1986 the Reagan administration was worried that Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi might be planning to initiate a major terrorist campaign. To prevent that from happening, the White House put out false reports that Gaddafi “was about to be attacked again by U.S. bombers and perhaps be ousted in a coup.”
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Although the United States had no intention of bombing Libya, it hoped that Gaddafi would think that the threat was credible and abandon any plans he might have to support terrorism.

NATO’s nuclear policy during the Cold War is another case of an empty threat being used for deterrence purposes. The alliance’s official position was that if the Warsaw Pact
nations attacked Western Europe and began advancing across Germany, NATO would employ its nuclear weapons to force the Soviet Union and its allies to halt their offensive and possibly even retreat back to their starting positions along the intra-German border. However, some important American policymakers, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, publicly endorsed this policy when they were in office, but later made clear that they would not have used nuclear weapons to defend Western Europe in the event of a massive Soviet conventional attack.
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Their unwillingness to initiate nuclear war was largely a result of the fact that Moscow would surely have retaliated against the United States with its own nuclear weapons, thus risking mutual suicide. Still, it made good sense for NATO policymakers to tell the Soviets that the alliance would use its nuclear weapons to defend Western Europe, even if they thought that was a crazy idea, because Moscow could never be sure that those weapons would not be used, which significantly enhanced deterrence.

Sixth, leaders might lie to provoke another state into attacking their state or another country. Bismarck’s behavior in the run-up to the Franco-Prussian War (1870) is probably the most well-known case of a leader purposely giving another country a
casus belli
to attack his own state.
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And he did it with the help of well-told lies. The Prussian chancellor was committed to creating a unified Germany, and he believed that provoking France to declare war against Prussia, or even a major crisis that threw France into a state of turmoil, would help achieve that goal. Toward that end, he began working assiduously in the spring of 1870 to put a Prussian prince on the throne of Spain, knowing full well that it would alarm and anger France. He denied, however, that he had anything to do with that ploy, which was a lie.

Bismarck spread a second and more important falsehood when he “doctored” the famous Ems Dispatch from Kaiser Wilhelm I to Napoleon III. After the chancellor’s efforts to place a Prussian noble on the Spanish throne failed, the French demanded that the kaiser promise that he would not raise the issue again. In his draft response, the kaiser said no, but he left the door open for further negotiations. Fearing that this might lead to a peaceful resolution of the crisis, Bismarck edited the kaiser’s draft to make it look like the kaiser was not only saying no, but was also closing the door on any further discussion of the matter. The doctored telegram was then published, and there was outrage across France. Shortly thereafter, Napoleon III foolishly declared war against Prussia.

Seventh, a country that is worried that its allies are not paying enough attention to a dangerous rival state might lie about that adversary’s capabilities or behavior to make it look more menacing to its allies. The Bush administration engaged in this kind of lying in early 2005, when it was worried that China, Japan, and South Korea did not fully appreciate the seriousness of the threat posed by North Korea.
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To get their attention, officials from the National Security Council went to Asia and made the case that North Korea had sold Libya uranium hexafluoride, a critical ingredient for making nuclear weapons. But that was not true. Pakistan, not North Korea, had actually sold the uranium hexafluoride to Libya, and although it is possible that Pakistan originally got that compound from North Korea, there is no evidence in the public record that Pyongyang gave it to Islamabad with the understanding that it would eventually be transferred to Libya. In fact, the available evidence indicates that they were separate deals.

An eighth kind of inter-state lie is where leaders mislead to facilitate spying or sabotage during peacetime, as well as to limit the international fallout if caught in the act. For example, the United States engaged in lying after the U-2
spy plane piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in the spring of 1960. At the time, President Eisenhower was about to go to Paris to enter into serious negotiations with Premier Khrushchev over a nuclear-test-ban treaty, and he had made it clear that he did not want any complications from the controversial U-2 flights. After the spy plane was brought down, the president was told that the U-2s had a self-destruct mechanism, which guaranteed that neither Powers nor the plane would survive. So after Khrushchev announced the downing of the U-2, the Eisenhower administration declared that it was not a spy plane but a NASA weather-research plane that had accidentally wandered into Soviet airspace. When the Soviets then produced Powers, the State Department said that he had probably lost consciousness from a lack of oxygen and drifted into Soviet airspace. Finally, Washington was forced to admit that Powers was on a spying mission over Soviet territory.

But that was not the end of the lying. The Eisenhower administration then put out the story that although the president approved of the surveillance program, he was not personally involved in the planning of the overflights. In fact, Eisenhower later admitted that “each series of intrusions was planned and executed with my knowledge and permission.”
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The infamous Lavon affair involving Israel provides another good example of this type of inter-state lying. In 1954, Israel set out to damage Egypt’s relations with Britain and the United States by setting up a spy ring inside Egypt that would sabotage American and British facilities, but make it look like the Egyptians were responsible. After bombing the U.S. Information Service libraries in Alexandria and Cairo as well as a few other targets, plans went awry and the saboteurs were caught. Not surprisingly, Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett maintained that it was all a “wicked plot hatched in Alexandria,” indeed a “show trial
which is being organized there against a group of Jews who have fallen victims to false accusations.”
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Ninth, states lie to gain advantage in the course of conducting military operations in wartime. During World War II, for example, the British mounted a massive deception campaign against Nazi Germany in which lying was commonplace. Indeed, it was in the context of these operations that Churchill made his famous statement that “in war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
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The British were hardly an exception in this regard, as Roosevelt made clear when he said in May 1942 that he was “perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.”
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In fact, all of the participants in World War II mounted strategic deception campaigns against their rivals. Moreover, this stratagem is employed in virtually every war.
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The tenth kind of inter-state lying involves leaders attempting to get a better deal for their country when they are negotiating treaties and other formal agreements. They might lie to their bargaining partners about their own assets or capabilities, or, more likely, they might bluff about their reservation price—the price above or below which they would not be willing to cut a deal. One would expect to find examples of this kind of lying in a wide variety of circumstances, including arms-control and war-termination negotiations on the security side and international debt, trade, and monetary dealings on the economic side. After all, that is what happens when individuals negotiate over the selling price of a car or a house. Moreover, bargaining theory, which has attracted much attention among international-relations scholars in recent years, would seem to predict a good deal of lying in these circumstances. “Bargaining power,” in the words of Nobel Prize–winning economist Thomas Schelling, is “the power to fool and bluff,” and bluffing, of course, is all about “the conveyance of false information.”
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To my surprise, I have only been able to find a few examples of leaders or diplomats lying or bluffing when they are negotiating treaties or other kinds of covenants.
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There may in fact be many such cases, but if so they have been covered up and are not part of the historical record. But I think not. There is no question that someone who succeeds at bluffing is unlikely to boast about it right after the fact. It makes much more sense to cover up the lie or at least be circumspect about it.
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Otherwise, the other side might demand to renegotiate the deal or be loath to cut future deals for fear of being played for a sucker again. Still, this line of argument does not make sense because—as I discussed earlier—it is difficult to hide a lie for a long period of time. It is hard to believe that bluffing in international negotiations has been commonplace over time, but very few cases have been revealed to the public.
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One case that has been revealed involves Greece lying about its budget deficits so that it could gain entry into the eurozone.
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According to the European Union’s rules, a member country should only be allowed to adopt the euro as its currency if it maintains deficits that are less than 3 percent of the gross domestic product. During the late 1990s, when Greece was being evaluated for possible admission into the eurozone, it was running deficits that were well above that threshold. To deal with this problem, Athens simply lied about the numbers for the relevant years, claiming that its deficits were well under 3 percent when they were not. The gambit worked, and Greece adopted the single currency in 2001.

The United States also lied to its Western European allies (France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries) in the early 1950s to try to persuade them to ratify the European Defense Community (EDC) Treaty, which they had signed in May 1952. The Eisenhower administration strongly supported ratification, in the hope that a functioning EDC could balance the Soviet Union and enable the United States to withdraw
most of its troops from Western Europe. As the historian Marc Trachtenberg puts it, “The real point of EDC … was to weld France and Germany together as the core of a strong European federation that could stand up to Russia on its own, and thus make it possible for American forces to withdraw from Europe in the near future.”
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The Europeans, however, suspected that American support for the EDC was driven largely by Washington’s desire to leave the continent, which was an outcome that most Europeans, and especially the French, did not want at all. To deal with this problem, the Eisenhower administration repeatedly assured its allies that ratifying the EDC would not precipitate an American withdrawal, when that was not true. And when there were leaks to the press about what the Americans were up to, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as one scholar put it, “was willing to openly lie and state to the press that no U.S. troop withdrawals were being contemplated.”
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There are four sets of circumstances which are likely to promote inter-state lying, which is not to say that leaders frequently lie in these situations. Countries that are located in dangerous areas where there is intense security competition are more likely to lie than states that live in relatively peaceful regions. This tendency is largely a result of the high premium that states place on survival. States that operate in high-threat environments invariably have an acute sense of vulnerability and thus are strongly inclined to employ any tactic or strategy that might enhance their security. In short, lying comes easy to leaders who think that they live in a Hobbesian world.

Leaders are also more likely to lie in a crisis than during periods of relative calm. A state bent on avoiding war will
have powerful incentives to spread falsehoods if doing so will help end the crisis without a fight. On the other hand, a leader determined to turn a crisis into a war will almost certainly lie if he thinks that doing so will help create the conditions for launching and winning the war. None of this is to deny that each side in a crisis will be suspicious of the other’s pronouncements, which will make it difficult, although not impossible, to tell persuasive lies.