Free Why Leaders Lie by John J. Mearsheimer Page B

combat. Everyone in the chain of command needs to be confident that they are receiving truthful information from their superiors and subordinates. Otherwise, commanders and their staffs would make plans and wage war on the basis of faulty information, which would markedly increase the likelihood of failure as well as unnecessary casualties. This is why institutions like West Point place great emphasis on their honor code. While deception has no place inside a military organization, it is expected that rival militaries will try to deceive each other, especially in wartime.
32 . Thomas C. Schelling,
The Strategy of Conflict
(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 23, 33. See also Thomas C. Schelling, “Game Theory and the Study of Ethical Systems,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution
12, no. 1 (March 1968): 34–44.
33 . Although the conventional wisdom is that bluffing is commonplace in labor negotiations, at least one scholar argues that it happens “less often than many writers suggest.” Chris Provis, “Ethics, Deception and Labor Negotiation,”
Journal of Business Ethics
28, no. 2 (November 2000):145–58.
34 . The same logic explains why poker players do not show their hole cards following a successful bluff; if they did, the tactic might not work again.
35 . There is hardly any evidence of lying in Andrew Moravcsik’s detailed analysis of the various bargains among the European countries that created the European Union,
The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Although Moravcsik does not directly say why lying is absent from the history he examined, it seems clear that it is because he believes that the relevant European states only came to the bargaining table when: (1) there was substantial overlap among their preferences; (2) they all knew a great about “the range of potential agreements, national preferences, and institutional options”; and (3) they all thought that an agreement would lead to “joint gains.” Not only would it have been hard to lie in such an information-rich environment, but it also would have made no sense, because such deceitful behavior probably would have scuttled the deal, “a result that would leave all worse off” (ibid., 61, 481–85).
36 . Anthee Carassava, “Greece Admits Faking Data to Join Europe,”
New York Times
, September 23, 2004; Daniel Howden and Stephen Castle, “Greece Admits Deficit Figures Were Fudged to Secure Euro Entry,”
Independent
, November 16, 2004; Helena Smith and Larry Elliot, “EU Raps Greece over Deficit,”
Guardian
, December 2, 2004.
37 . Trachtenberg,
Constructed Peace
, 121–22. See also James McAllister,
No Exit: America and the German Problem, 1943–1954
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 225.
38 . McCallister,
No Exit
, 234. See also minutes of National Security Council Meeting, December 10, 1953, in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), 2:450–51.
39 . Ponsonby,
Falsehood in War-Time
, 19.
40 . Charles Horton Cooley,
Human Nature and the Social Order
, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 388.
Chapter 4
     
1 . James Chace,
Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), chap. 16.
2 . Quoted in Michael Hirsh, “Bernard Lewis Revisited,”
Washington Monthly
, November 2004.
3 . Among the best sources on the
Greer
incident are Robert Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 285–88; Waldo Heinrichs,
Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 166–68;David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 497–99; William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason,
The Undeclared War: