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. There has never been a sharp analysis of international lying. Now a leading expert provides a richly informed and powerfully argued work that will change our understanding of why leaders lie.

二十多年来，约翰-J-米尔斯海默一直被认为是最重要的现实主义外交政策思想家之一。他与人合著的2007年《纽约时报》畅销书《以色列游说团与美国外交政策》以其对美国中东政策形成的毫不留情的审视，引起了一场风暴。现在，他对国际关系中另一个有争议但未被充分研究的方面进行了研究：撒谎。在《领导人为何撒谎》一书中，米尔斯海默首次系统地分析了作为国家政策工具的谎言，确定了其种类、原因以及潜在的成本和收益。他通过大量的例子，认为领导人经常出于良好的战略原因而撒谎，因此一概谴责是不现实和不明智的。然而，除了撒谎，还有其他类型的欺骗，包括隐瞒和欺骗。也许没有什么区别比对另一个国家撒谎和对自己的人民撒谎更重要了。米尔斯海默惊讶地发现，国家间的谎言是多么的不寻常；鉴于大国之间不信任的氛围，他发现，赤裸裸的欺骗是很难做到的，因此很少值得努力。此外，当它发生时，有时会适得其反。赫鲁晓夫在苏联导弹部队的规模上撒了谎，引发了美国的集结。艾森豪威尔在1960年被发现在U-2间谍飞行方面撒谎，从而破坏了即将与赫鲁晓夫举行的峰会。与其他国家相比，领导人更有可能误导自己的公众，有时还会造成破坏性后果。尽管原因可能是高尚的--例如，富兰克林-罗斯福在1940年向美国人民谎称德国U型潜艇袭击了 "格里尔 "号驱逐舰，以建立对希特勒的战争理由--但它们很容易导致灾难，正如布什政府在伊拉克大规模杀伤性武器问题上的谎言。从来没有人对国际谎言进行过尖锐的分析。现在，一位领先的专家提供了一部内容丰富、论证有力的作品，它将改变我们对领导人撒谎原因的理解。