The anti-assassination norm between states is dying — SkimNews
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- An alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Trump during the NATO summit in Turkey surfaced in the second week of August, with intelligence suggesting a surface-to-air missile attack on his aircraft; the CIA reportedly had low confidence in the information shared by Israel, and public debate centered on intelligence credibility rather than the act itself.
- The norm against interstate leadership assassination developed alongside the Westphalian order and was codified in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and reinforced in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibited "treacherous" killing and acts of "perfidy" against enemy personnel.
- President Gerald Ford's 1976 Executive Order, issued after the Church Committee exposed CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, made the prohibition explicit in American domestic law—though covert Cold War operations continued under the cover of "plausible deniability," itself a form of normative compliance.
- The 1990s–2000s humanitarian argument for targeted removal of brutal leaders was tested against Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, but both Iraq and Libya suffered state collapse, civil conflict, and humanitarian catastrophes that, the author argues, repudiated the argument comprehensively.
- The January 3, 2020 US drone strike killing Major General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad extended targeted killing into interstate relations—he was a senior uniformed official of a sovereign state killed in a third country's territory without a declared war—and the US publicly defended it as anticipatory self-defense, openly validating the practice.
- The February 28 killing of senior Iranian leaders, including the supreme leader, in the opening phase of the US-Iran war institutionalized leadership decapitation as an operational logic of interstate war, moving the practice from exception to normalized instrument.
- Author Sajid Farid Shapoo, a three-star Indian general with a Princeton PhD in security studies, warns that autonomous strike technologies combined with this normative erosion invite behavioral escalation and reciprocal targeting, weakening the idea that states and their heads are durable legal entities.
Why it matters: The US has now both publicly defended and operationally integrated leadership decapitation into war strategy, with the February 28 strike on Iran's supreme leader converting the practice from contested exception to normalized instrument. By validating this template, a norm designed to protect sovereign rulers has been inverted into a tool weaker states may now adopt, raising the cost of diplomacy itself since negotiation may be read as prelude to elimination.
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