I hope this book will be a conversation starter on an important topic that hitherto has received scant attention. If I am successful, others will follow in my footsteps and refine and challenge my arguments.
Both sides acted in ways that are consistent with 2 of the main findings in this book. Specifically, I find that leaders do not lie very often to other countries, but instead seem more inclined to lie to their own people.
That certainly seems to be true for democracies that pursue ambitious foreign policies and are inclined to initiate wars of choice, i.e., when there is not a clear and imminent danger to a country’s vital interests that can only be dealt with by force.
In none of those cases were the president or his lieutenants lying for narrow personal gain. They thought they were acting in the American national interest, which is not to say they acted wisely in every case. But the fact is that there are good strategic reasons for leaders to lie to their publics as well as to other countries. These practical logics almost always override well-known and widely accepted moral strictures against lying. Indeed, leaders sometimes think that they have a moral duty to lie to protect their country.
Their publics usually do not punish them for their deceptions, however, unless they lead to bad results. It seems clear that leaders and their publics believe that lying is an integral part of international relations.
Leaders and their publics understand that states operate in a self-help world where they have to do whatever is necessary to provide for their own security. It’s that means lying and cheating, so be it. International politics, in other words, tends to be a realm where rules are often broken with little consequence.
Lying is obviously a form of deception, but not all deception is lying. There are 2 other kinds of deception: concealment and spinning. Unlike lying, neither involves making a false statement or telling a story with a false bottom line.
A person interviewing for a job is allowed to spin his life story on a resume in ways that present him in the most favorable light. He is free to omit information from that resume as he sees fit. Politics is an especially fertile breeding ground for spinning and concealing.
At the most general level, one can think about lying from either an absolutist or a utilitarian perspective. Absolutists like Kant and Augustine maintain that lying is always wrong and that it has hardly any positive effects. Lying, according to Kant, is “the greatest violation of man’s duty to himself.” Utilitarians, on the other hand, believe that lying sometimes makes sense, because it serves a useful social purpose; but other times it does not. The key is to determine when and why lying has positive utility.
Roosevelt’s objective was the right one and it was appropriate for him to lie in this instance.
Truth telling is when an individual does his best to state the facts and tell a story in a straightforward and honest way. Every person invariably has limited knowledge about the details of any case and biases as well. Memories can also be faulty and it is impossible to relate every fact one knows when telling a story. The key point, however, is that a truth teller makes a serious effort to overcome any biases or selfish interests that he might have and report the relevant facts in as fair-minded a way as he can. Deception, in contrast, is where an individual purposely takes steps that are designed to prevent others from knowing the full truth — as that individual understands it — about a particular matter. The deliberate aim, in other words, is not to provide a straightforward or comprehensive description of events.
Lying is when a person makes a statement that he knows or suspects to be false in the hope that others will think it is true. A lie is a positive action designed to deceive the target audience.
Spinning is when a person telling a story emphasizes certain facts and links them together in ways that play to his advantage, while at the same time, downplay ing or ignoring inconvenient facts. Spinning is all about interpreting the known facts in a way that allows the spinner to tell a favorable story. With spinning, no attempt is made to render a completely accurate account of events. The basic story being told is distorted, but the facts are not put together so as to tell a false story, which would be a lie.
I’ve learned you can always tell the truth, but you don’t have to tell the whole truth.
When a witness is called to the stand he is sworn to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” and then he is asked a series of questions, which he is expected to answer truthfully. The attorneys, on the other hand, are primarily interested in winning the case for their clients, not determining the full truth about what happened in the dispute at hand. Accordingly, each makes an opening and closing statement in which he spins the facts of the case in ways that puts his client in the most favorable light. The rival lawyers invariably tell 2 different stories, but neither is allowed to lie. “A lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal.” Spinning, however, is not only permissible; it is what lawyers routinely do for their clients.
Lying is usually considered deplorable behavior, whereas most people seem to believe that it is acceptable to spin and conceal, even though these behaviors are designed to deceive. One possible reason for this difference is that lying is more difficult to detect and protect against than either spinning or concealment. Liars make false assertions in ways that are designed not to raise any doubts about the truthfulness of their claims. Skillful liars present false assertions with an air of certainty that makes it especially difficult for the target audience to figure out that it is being bamboozled.
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.
Nationalist myth making is when leaders tell lies, mainly to their own people, about their country’s past. 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.
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.
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.
In 1954, Israel set out to damage Egypt’s relations with Britain and the US by setting up a spy ring inside Egypt that would sabotage American and British facilities, but make it look like the Egyptians were responsible.
It was in the context of these operations that Churchill made his famous statement that “in war-time, truth is so precious that he should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Roosevelt made clear that he was “perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.”
“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.
No 2 countries always have the same interests — including allies — and it is possible in a crisis that one ally will abandon another or even turn on its partner.
Roosevelt proclaimed that, “We have sought no shooting war with Hitler. We do not seek it now.” In fact, he met Churchill the previous month, and according to Churchill, Roosevelt “said he would wage wag, but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative. Everything was to be done to force an incident which would justify him in opening hostilities.”
Fearmongering, which is a straightforward top-down form of behavior, is an antidemocratic at its core, although leaders do it because they think it is in the national interest, not for personal gain.
There are a number of reasons why average citizens might not be able to comprehend a particular threat. They might not be sufficiently interested in international affairs to appreciate that their country is facing a lurking danger, even when their leaders give them unvarnished evidence of the threat. Moreover, they might not be collectively smart enough to recognize a specific threat. It is also possible that those citizens might get weak-kneed when confronted with a menacing threat. In short, the broader public might be prone to some combination of ignorance, stupidity, and cowardice.
There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.
He was clearly incompetent and most French political leaders knew it. But they could not tell the public that he was inept when thousands of French soldiers under his command were being wounded or killed each week. They feared that revealing the true facts about Joffre would badly weaken morale on the home front and possibly undermine the war effort. So they falsely portrayed him as an able leader.
Stipulating when strategic cover-ups are more or less likely is somewhat complicated because this kind of deception involves 2 kinds of behavior — hiding incompetence and masking controversial policies — and 2 different audiences — other countries and the leader’s own public.
With the rise of nationalism over the past 2 centuries, numerous ethnic or national groups around the world have established or have tried to establish their own state, or what is commonly called a nation-state. In the process, each group has created its own sacred myths about the past that portray it in a favorable way and portray rival national groups in a negative light.
These false stories help fuel group solidarity; they help create a powerful sense of nationhood, which is essential for building and maintaining a viable nation-state. In particular, these fictions help give members of national group the sense that they are part of a noble enterprise, which they should not only be proud of, but for which they should be willing to endure significant hardships, including fighting and dying if necessary.
In fact, the common people invariably hunger for these myths; they want to be told stories about the past in which they are portrayed as the white hats and opposing nations as the black hats. In effect, nationalist mythmaking is driven from below as well as from above.
According to the myth that was invented, the Palestinians were not cleansed by the Zionists; instead, they were said to have fled their homes because the surrounding Arab countries told them to move out so that their armies could move in and drive the Jews into the sea.
Most statesmen claim that they accept these liberal norms and invariably emphasize their commitment to the rule of law. Nevertheless, leaders sometimes conclude that their national interest compels them to act in ways that contradict these rules.
Such brutal state behavior, however, is not restricted to wartime. The US, for example, played the leading role in getting the UN to impose economic sanctions on Iraq from 1990 until 2003. That financial and trade embargo helped created a humanitarian disaster, killing about 500K Iraqi civilians. Statesmen also form alliances with particular odious countries when they believe that it makes good strategic sense.
Virtually all leaders — whether they head up autocracies or democracies — are won’t to justify their behavior in terms of liberal norms and international law, even when their actions are principally motivated by the kind of hard-headed strategic calculations identified with realism.
Lying by government officials can also cripple a state’s policy-making process, whether it is a democracy or not. The main reason is that the transaction costs in a world of deceit are enormous, because policymakers cannot trust each other, and thus they have to devote extra time and resources to making sure that the information they have at their disposal is accurate. But even when they perform due diligence, they still might not get all of their facts correct, in which case their decisions will be based on false information, which would greatly increase the chances of pursuing wrongheaded policies.
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. 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.
In the realm of high politics, where lying seems to be more frequent but still not commonplace, reputation does not matter much. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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 of a substantial number of outside experts oppose or are likely to oppose the policy in question.
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 alls — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakably certain of being in the right.” 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.
The liberal lies that leaders tell also have little effect on how their country acts in the international area. The same logic that underpins national myth making 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.