Why Leaders Lie by John J. Mearsheimer Read Free Book Online Page A

fight.
    Furthermore, hiding botched policies can lead to further disasters down the road, not just because incompetents are usually kept in key leadership positions for at least some period of time, but also because engaging in cover-ups makes it difficult to have a national security system in which policymakers and military commanders are held accountable for their actions. No organization can work effectively without accountability at every level of the operation. Finally, if a botched policy is kept under tight wraps, it is difficult to have a meaningful discussion about what went wrong and how best to make sure that it does not happen again.
    In sum, strategic cover-ups may sometimes be necessary, but they carry significant risks, because they haveconsiderable potential for backfiring as well as corrupting daily life on the home front.
THE RISKS OF NATIONALIST MYTHMAKING
     
    Lying to help perpetrate national myths is unlikely to have harmful domestic or foreign-policy consequences. There is not much danger of blowback because most people are usually so taken with their nation’s myths that they do not recognize them for what they are. Instead, they see the myths as hallowed truths, not lies or distortions of the historical record. 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 also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakably certain of being in the right.” 9 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. As the scholar Richard Neustadt notes, “The tendency of bureaucratic language to create in private the same images presented to the public never should be underrated.” 10
    What about foreign policy? A number of prominent scholars, including Yale historian Paul Kennedy and Stephen Van Evera, maintain that nationalist myths sometimes lead states to behave foolishly. 11 Indeed, these kinds of myths are said to cause countries to act aggressively toward their neighbors and to refuse to resolve conflicts that are otherwise amenable to a peaceful settlement. Nationalist myths, for example, are said to be a major cause of Germany’s aggressive behavior in the early part of the twentieth century—including starting World War I. Chauvinistic myths about Israel’s history are said to be one of the main reasons that Israelis will notpermit the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own, which makes it impossible to put an end to their longstanding conflict.
    This perspective is wrong, however, because the causal arrow goes in the opposite direction: foreign policy behavior drives the creation of nationalist myths, not the other way around. Specifically, the rhetoric of nationalism is tailored to suit the behavior of states, which is driven largely by other calculations. For example, Germany’s aggressive behavior in the years leading up to World War I was driven mainly by concerns about the European balance of power, and the national myths that it deployed back then were largely designed to justify its belligerent actions. 12 Israel’s efforts to control all of what was once called Mandatory Palestine and deny the Palestinians a state of their own has been a central part of the Zionist agenda since its inception in the late 1880s. 13 Israel’s actions since its founding in 1948 have been largely consistent with that original Zionist vision, and have not been driven in any meaningful way by the various nationalist myths that Israelis have invented. The main purpose of those false stories has been to whitewash Israel’s brutal behavior toward the Palestinians, so that Israelis and their allies abroad think that Israel is always right and the Palestinians always wrong.
    None of this