Lying in the real world is more difficult to identify. Politicians can be tricked by clever media questioning into admissions that later seem irrelevant or unimportant. The camera can lie by staging and editing. Politicians have learned to be evasive with sound bites and dot points, rather than to provide intelligible sentences. Unless the issue is brought to a head in a court of law, it tends to be lost in the rough and tumble of political life. Even so, politicians find it necessary to protest that they have done nothing ‘wrong’ or ‘illegal’.

Yet in one sphere of politics – foreign policy – politicians are expected to lie, because it is believed to be good for their country. This is the subject of John Mearsheimer’s short book, which is both engaging and depressing. It is engaging because the author, who is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, adopts a morally neutral stance, treating lying like other political activities and teasing out in readable prose and cool analysis the differences between lying, cheating, concealment, and deception, and then between several kinds of lying – inter-state, fear-mongering, strategic cover-up, and nationalist myth-making. He exhaustively examines each for cause and effect, policy and political consequences, crossovers between domestic and foreign territory, and much more. He calculates the upside and downside of lying, the dangers of backfire and blowback. The intensity of the analysis is dense and forensic, but, although the discussion is lively, it is not always clear where it is heading. It is possible to put down this book convinced both that lying about foreign policy is a necessary part of political life in a democracy and that it has a corrosive effect on democratic institutions and leads to disasters abroad.

This is because the framework of the professor’s discourse is what is called ‘anarchy’ in international politics, a world in which there is no alternative for the two hundred or so states in it but to look after themselves. This is the realist model of international relations that has dominated thinking about foreign policy since the beginning of the modern secular state that scholars like to date from the treaties of Westphalia in 1648.

Realists distinguish public from private morality. An individual may sacrifice personal interests, even life, for a higher cause, but the state cannot. Its first priority is survival, and it is allowed, indeed obliged, to do anything to prevent its demise. So Machiavelli instructs his prince how not to be good, and a popular myth persists that diplomacy is a form of stylish deceit. For the American humorist Will Rogers, ‘Diplomacy is like saying “Nice doggie” until you can find a rock’.

Mearsheimer, with Stephen Walt, was co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007),which caused a stir by exposing the influence of the lobby on both sides of US politics. He draws on President George W. Bush’s lies and misdemeanours over the Iraq war for many of his most critical findings. He also makes use of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. John F. Kennedy has generally been commended for the way he handled an impetuous move by Nikita Khrushchev to place intermediate range missiles in Cuba, which threatened the United States. Kennedy showed skill and courage under pressure, responding selectively to Khrushchev’s letters and holding off his own military advisers, to the advantage of diplomacy over the use of force. But he did not tell the American public of the essential deal that broke the crisis, which was that, in return for removing the missiles from Cuba, the United States would remove its missiles from Turkey, which threatened the Soviet Union.

The president understood that this concession would not play well with the American public, especially with the political right, and would also damage Washington’s relations with its NATO allies, especially Turkey. So he told the Soviets that they could not speak openly about the deal, or else he would have to deny it and ultimately renege on it. Still, there were suspicions in the West that such a deal had been cut [...] and [the] president and his principal advisors lied and denied there had been an agreement [...] In retrospect, it appears to have been a noble lie, since it helped to defuse an extremely dangerous confrontation between two states armed with nuclear weapons.

So, what is depressing about this book? It assumes that lying about foreign policy is an essential part of democracy and, in particular, is embedded in American politics. Mearsheimer concludes that the leaders who are most likely to lie to their publics are ‘those who head democracies bent on fighting wars of choice in distant places’. The United States and Britain fit the bill (Australia escapes mention). There is a dominant belief in the United States of ‘a moral as well as strategic responsibility not only to police the entire globe, but also to try to shape the politics of individual countries’. He points out that the United States has been at war for fourteen of the twenty-two years since the Cold War ended. He predicts that the foreign-policy élite’s ‘enthusiasm for reshaping the world at the end of a rifle barrel’ will continue and that the media and the electorate will follow.

I say ‘presumably’ because he does not pay much attention to changes since the Cold War in both domestic and international politics. The world we live in is not behaving according to realist principles. It exhibits contradictory symptoms of conflict, disorder, and uncertainty, suggesting a transition from one kind of global order to another. It is indeed more than two decades since the Cold War ended. By now a familiar model of power should have emerged in response to US supremacy, but it has not. Economic globalisation swept the world, transplanting the capitalist system. Military régimes lost status against countries that were well run economically. Then a global financial crisis unsettled some that were economically successful, including Europe and the United States. The successful model of capitalism that thrust the United States into world leadership – that the workers of mass production were highly paid and therefore also consumers – was adopted by the disciplined societies of Asia, including, lately, China. The Internet and its progeny undermined the power of the state, especially the secret state. The emergence of human rights and a dramatic development of international criminal law are testing the authority of leaders to use force. The effect is that power generally is fragmented and diffused.

What is slowly emerging is an alternative to world order based on military power. It is rules-based, but one in which the rules are not yet fully understood or obeyed. It is based on organisations as diverse as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the G-20 group of economic leaders, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the International Criminal Court, as well as hundreds of non-government bodies that are creating an international civil society.

Professor Mearsheimer gives no encouragement to friends and allies that the United States has a role in shaping this new world order. I hope he is wrong. If he is right, we are in for a rough time.