What do the killing of influencer Charlie Kirk and Israel’s unsuccessful attempt to kill some top Hamas officials by bombing Qatar have in common? There are obvious and important differences: The former appears to have been an isolated act by an individual whose motives remain unclear, while the latter was a deliberate military action ordered by an elected government whose motives are obvious. Yet both acts can also be viewed as a symptom of the broader erosion of norms in contemporary politics, both between states and within them, and especially the tendency to see assassination as a legitimate political tactic.
Political killings are not a new phenomenon, of course. But as Ward Thomas showed in a seminal International Security article in 2000, for several centuries there was a remarkably effective norm against government leaders attempting to kill their counterparts in other countries. State-sponsored assassinations had once been common, he argued, but over time this tactic fell from favor among the major powers, and a norm against it gradually emerged.
The shift reflected a combination of material-strategic interests and evolving normative beliefs. Assassination was a tool that weaker states could sometimes use against more powerful rivals, and the great powers preferred to confine violent political action (i.e., war) to the battlefield, where their superior resources were likely to prevail. Moreover, ruling elites in different countries had a mutual interest in not trying to kill one another—whatever their other differences might be—even as they sent thousands of their subjects to die in bloody battles.
The norm against assassination also reflected the realpolitik notion that national leaders were subject to different moral principles than ordinary individuals were, and that they should not be held personally accountable for acts undertaken on behalf of the state. A private individual who killed someone could be indicted and convicted, but a monarch or prime minister who launched a war “in the national interest” could get off scot-free even if thousands died as a result of the decision. Leaders who started an unsuccessful war might be ousted from power, but they were rarely tried or punished as long as they had been acting in an official capacity.
Nowhere was this double standard clearer than in the aftermath of World War I, when the deposed German kaiser, Wilhelm II, was allowed to live out the rest of his days in tranquil exile in Holland. A century before, Napoleon Bonaparte was spared direct punishment despite having plunged Europe into war on several occasions, though he was eventually sent to grow old and die in lonely exile in the South Atlantic. Remarkably, the norm against assassination was observed even during horrible wars: The Allies never tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler (though some Germans did), nor did they directly target Japanese Emperor Hirohito or Italian leader Benito Mussolini. (The United States did target and kill Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto by shooting down his plane, but he was a military commander, not a civilian official.)
According to Thomas, the norm began to break down in the aftermath of World War II, as new ethical and material considerations took hold. At the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, the victorious Allies rejected the previous distinction between public and private acts and held former Japanese and German officials personally responsible for their official (and unquestionably heinous) actions. A similar impulse inspired the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a growing if depressingly inconsistent global commitment to punish those responsible for war crimes, genocides, or other crimes against humanity. The subsequent creation of the International Criminal Court and related efforts to sanction leaders deemed guilty of such major offenses were part of the same broad trend.
Why did this shift in normative perspective matter? Because if individual leaders were now morally accountable for their decisions, it became easier to justify direct action against those who were judged to be especially evil and/or dangerous. Going after a single leader (and perhaps a handful of close associates) could also be regarded as preferable to starting a war in which many more people would lose their lives. Assassination began to look like a more cost-effective way of dealing with political problems and even more so as military technology made precision strikes and targeted killings feasible, at least for the most militarily capable countries.
Instead of being exceedingly rare, therefore, over time state-sponsored assassinations of rival leaders became more common. During the Cold War, for instance, the United States killed, helped kill, or tried to kill Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Ngo Dinh Diem, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and several other foreign leaders. The Bush administration deliberately targeted Saddam Hussein at the onset of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in 2020, the Trump administration killed Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, in a missile strike. (Suleimani was both a military leader and a senior civilian official; imagine how Americans would react if a foreign country deliberately targeted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.) Israel has killed many of its political opponents over the years, including the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as multiple Iranian civilian nuclear scientists. North Korea tried to assassinate two different presidents of South Korea, once in 1968 and again in 1983. Ukraine has said Russia has repeatedly tried to kill President Volodymyr Zelensky. The earlier norm that governments should not target their foreign counterparts is clearly on life support.
This is a deeply worrisome development, for at least three reasons.
First, although even strong norms cannot prevent powerful states from acting as they wish, violating a well-established norm imposes reputational costs on the violator and discourages others from maintaining close or cooperative relations with it. As the norm erodes, the deterrent value of these reputational consequences declines, and more states will see assassination as a legitimate, if extreme, form of political action. Governments everywhere will be more fearful and less trusting, and reaching mutually acceptable solutions to existing disputes will be more difficult. After all, how can you negotiate in good faith with someone who is actively trying to kill you? The more the norm erodes, the nastier and more contentious world politics will be.
Second, and following from the first point, jettisoning the norm against assassination will discourage rivals from meeting—simply because doing so is perilous—thereby making it even harder to reach diplomatic solutions to ongoing conflicts. It will also discourage third parties from trying to aid such efforts. This is why Israel’s attack on Qatar was so foolhardy: In addition to further undermining Israel’s reputation as a responsible global actor, it will make some countries less willing to facilitate its diplomatic activities. All states must talk to their enemies on occasion, which usually requires neutral parties to facilitate the process. Violating Qatar’s sovereignty and the norm against assassination in this fashion throws more sand in the gears of international diplomacy at a time where we need more of it, not less. Israel’s willingness to attack a nominal U.S. ally without facing any discernible sanction from Washington also did additional damage to the United States’ tattered reputation in the region, though it is admittedly hard to see how it could sink much lower.
Lastly, the belief that it is perfectly OK to target and kill foreign officials with whom one is at odds makes it easier for some people to justify violent action against domestic political figures with whom they disagree. In both cases, potential targets are first demonized as the embodiment of evil and as a mortal threat to the nation. Once that label sticks, extreme measures to deal with them will seem permissible, maybe even necessary. If you’re American and are worried about the rising tide of violent political activity at home (which, contrary to the lies being uttered by Vice President J.D. Vance and other administration officials, comes overwhelmingly from the political right and not the left), then you should also worry about how the United States, some of its closest allies, and some other major powers have undermined the norm against assassination abroad.
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