Sir Henry Wotton, the seventeenth-century British diplomat, once remarked that an ambassador is "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.' This comment nicely captures the fact that states do lie to each other, because they think that lying serves the national interest. Wotton's remark, however, is misleading in the sense that it implies that diplomats and statesmen routinely spend their time lying to each other. In fact, political leaders and their diplomatic representatives tell each other the truth far more often than they lie. Even when they are bent on deceiving one another, they are more likely to rely on concealment rather than overt lying.
Secrecy, as virtually all students of international politics know well, is a time-honored approach to developing weapons and strategies that can give one country an advantage over its rivals.
Of course, one's definition of lying affects any assessment of how much lying there has been among states, or any other kind of lying, for that matter. Sissela Bok, for example, notes in her important treatise on lying that some people define the concept of lying so broadly that they "take all forms of deception to be lies, regardless of whether or not they involve statements of any kind." When this expansive definition is employed, people can then say that lying is rampant in daily life, and "that the average person lies ten, twenty, a hundred times a day."
If applied to international politics, this definition of lying would include spinning and concealment, as well as consciously telling a deliberate untruth, and one could therefore say that inter-state lying was commonplace. But if one defines lying more narrowly, as Bok and I do, it is not nearly as widespread, although it is surely not unknown. I believe a narrower definition makes more sense, because it allows us to discriminate between different forms of deception and to theorize about when and why each may be employed.
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