For more than two decades, John J. Mearsheimer has been regarded as one of the foremost
realist thinkers on foreign policy. Clear and incisive as well as a fearlessly honest analyst,
his coauthored 2007 New York Times bestseller, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, aroused
a firestorm with its unflinching look at the making of America's Middle East policy. Now he takes
a look at another controversial but understudied aspect of international relations: lying.
In Why Leaders Lie, Mearsheimer provides the first systematic analysis of lying as a tool of
statecraft, identifying the varieties, the reasons, and the potential costs and benefits. Drawing
on a wealth of examples, he argues that leaders often lie for good strategic reasons, so a blanket
condemnation is unrealistic and unwise. Yet there are other kinds of deception besides lying,
including concealment and spinning. Perhaps no distinction is more important than that between
lying to another state and lying to one's own people. Mearsheimer was amazed to discover how unusual
interstate lying has been; given the atmosphere of distrust among the great powers, he found that
outright deceit is difficult to pull off and thus rarely worth the effort. Moreover, it sometimes
backfires when it does occur. Khrushchev lied about the size of the Soviet missile force, sparking
an American build-up. Eisenhower was caught lying about U-2 spy flights in 1960, which scuttled an
upcoming summit with Krushchev. Leaders are more likely to mislead their own publics than other
states, sometimes with damaging consequences. Though the reasons may be noble Franklin Roosevelt,
for example, lied to the American people about German U-boats attacking the destroyer USS Greer in
1940, to build a case for war against Hitler-they can easily lead to disaster, as with the Bush
administration's falsehoods about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Download File Size:2 MB

---