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sanction is not even likely to work well, since most people understand that leaders sometimes lie to each other for the good of their countries. It is hard to shame a leader with that motive, even if he botches the job and gets caught red-handed.
    The target state might retaliate by ending ongoing negotiations or pursuing hard-line policies against the country that tried to dupe it. In that case, the exposed lie would seriously worsen relations between the involved countries. However, this is unlikely to happen, not only because the lie was exposed and failed to harm the intended target, but also because—as I have emphasized repeatedly—it is taken for granted that states lie to each other. There is no question that an unmasked lie could contribute to the deterioration of relations between two states, but it is highly unlikely that it would be the main driving force, which would almost certainly be some significant economic or political dispute between them.
    A case of backfiring that fits this profile occurred when the Eisenhower administration was caught telling a handfulof blatant lies about the U-2 incident in the spring of 1960. 5 The president himself felt humiliated when those lies were revealed, but more importantly, he was preparing at the time to meet with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. Both leaders were hoping to improve relations between the superpowers and slow down the nuclear arms race. But the planned summit was scuttled, in part because of the administration’s lies about the plane’s mission. The main reason it failed, however, was that the incident revealed to the world that the United States was violating Soviet airspace and operating spy planes over the Soviet Union, which caused Khrushchev significant political problems at home and made it difficult for him to meet and cooperate with Eisenhower. In short, the lies that the president and his advisors told to Moscow mattered, but not that much.
    One might argue that getting caught telling a lie hurts a state’s reputation, which can cause serious damage to its international position. As noted, reputation is important in the realm of low politics. 6 If a country made a practice of telling lies when dealing with economic and mundane political issues, it would quickly develop a reputation for dishonesty, which would discourage other countries from interacting and cooperating with it. But this is one reason why there is little inter-state lying when low politics are involved, which, of course, renders the reputation issue of little practical significance in this domain.
    In the realm of high politics, where lying seems to be more frequent but still not commonplace, reputation does not matter much. 7 Whenever an issue directly involves a country’s security, its leaders cannot afford to pay much attention to the reputation of other states, largely because they can never be sure that they will not be duped by a state with a good reputation. Just because a state has been honest ten times does not mean it will be honest the eleventh time. Being played for a sucker does not matter much when lowpolitics are in play, but it could have disastrous consequences if a country’s survival is at stake. Thus, when leaders are dealing with issues that involve national security, they largely discount the past behavior of other states, which effectively means that a damaged reputation is usually not a serious price to pay for getting caught in a lie.
    An inter-state lie can backfire in a second way. Specifically, the deceit can go undetected for a long enough time for the intended target to be bamboozled by the false story; nevertheless, the lie does not work as intended and leaves the country that told it worse off than it would have been had it not lied. In other words, a leader can successfully tell a misconceived lie. A good example of this phenomenon is Khrushchev’s lies about the Soviet missile force in the late 1950s. He greatly exaggerated Soviet