How the norm against killing foreign leaders unraveled — SkimNews
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- The norm against leadership assassination 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.
- Gerald Ford in 1976 issued an Executive Order, following the Church Committee's exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, making the prohibition explicit in American domestic law.
- Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad on January 3, 2020 — a senior uniformed official of a recognized sovereign state, in a third country's territory, without a declared war — with the US publicly defending it under anticipatory self-defense.
- Iran allegedly plotted to assassinate President Trump during the NATO summit in Turkey in the second week of August, reportedly planning to fire a surface-to-air missile at his aircraft; the CIA reportedly had low confidence in the Israel-shared intelligence.
- Iranian leaders, including the supreme leader, were killed in the February 28 opening phase of the US-Iran war, institutionalizing leadership decapitation as a normalized instrument of interstate warfare rather than an exception.
- Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were the test cases for the 1990s humanitarian argument for removing brutal leaders — but Iraq and Libya both experienced state collapse and humanitarian catastrophes after their rulers' removal.
Why it matters: Successive US actions — from the 2020 Soleimani strike to the killing of Iranian leaders including the supreme leader in the opening of the US-Iran war — have moved leadership assassination from a covert taboo into an openly defended, normalized practice. As precision strike tech improves, weaker states gain a validated template, making diplomacy itself suspect as a prelude to elimination.
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