The decapitation dilemma
Long regarded as dishonourable or counterproductive, the idea of targeting enemy leaders is becoming normalised. What do we lose along with the taboo?
Martin Sandbu
© Ben JonesA story is sometimes told that at the Battle of Waterloo, a soldier came to Wellington to report that British troops had spotted Napoleon and had him in their sights across the battlefield.
Could they fire at him?
Wellington is said to have refused to authorise the shot.
Killing the opposing commander — indeed the head of the enemy state — would have been ungentlemanly behaviour, and might cast doubt on who would have won the battle otherwise, tarnishing any victory.
The Wellington-Napoleon story may well be made up.
(“Apocryphal but possible,” says Andrew Roberts, a biographer of both leaders.)
But it illustrates an old question that Donald Trump has made extremely timely.
When, if ever, is it an appropriate tactic of war or foreign policy to engage in a “decapitation strike” — the intentional targeted killing of the leaders of another state?
No student of history or follower of international affairs should be surprised that states engage in assassinations.
Yet there seems to be something different about the explicit and indeed boastful targeting of Iran’s political leaders by the US and Israel in the latest Middle East war.
The American operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January, while not a killing, shocked the world in a similar way.
Both events had the flavour of a broken taboo about them.
Not only did the opening aerial attack against Iran kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader since 1989.
The Americans also straightforwardly asserted their intention to kill whoever would take his place if not to their liking.
Trump revealed — nonchalantly, as a minor complication of strategy — that the early strikes on Iran’s leadership had eliminated most of the expected successors too, so that Washington could no longer be sure to whom it could present any demands.
Scholars of the phenomenon agree that perspectives on targeting state leaders have been shifting.
International law itself has remained reasonably consistent.
In peacetime and while outside of their country, political leaders enjoy a range of diplomatic immunities.
In war, general laws of armed conflict apply.
“The key issue is the definition of an enemy combatant,” explains the veteran US diplomat and lawyer Philip Zelikow.
“Enemy leaders can be regarded as enemy combatants.”
Unless civilians participate in combat (although much depends on how this is determined), international law protects them.
So the answer to the question of whether it is legal to target a foreign leader for killing (or kidnapping) is that it can be.
Indeed, some legal scholars explicitly reject the existence of a legal prohibition against targeting state leaders per se.
A billboard in Tehran this month depicts Iran’s late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei handing the national flag to his son and successor Mojtaba © APBut the law is not all, and state-sponsored assassinations of other states’ leaders still transgress against well-established political and moral norms.
Until recently, “the general view was that there was an international prohibition on this, on the grounds that everybody would lose,” says Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London.
The US killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 under President Barack Obama, whose administration worked with a “kill list” of targeted terrorists, was seen as a success of spycraft.
Many were struck more recently by the execution of Israel’s pager attack on Hizbollah and its assassination of the armed group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2024.
When it comes to heads of state or government, however, the threshold has been higher.
“Leaders are a different category,” says Luca Trenta, a professor of international relations at Swansea University and author of The President’s Kill List, a book about the US government’s involvement in assassinations.
“This was understood as an agreement going back centuries: it’s fine to be at war but not to target each other’s leaders.”
The norm has often been breached.
Trenta cites — non-exhaustively — the killing of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in a CIA-backed coup in 1963; the Soviet assassination of Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin in 1979; and French campaigns against colonial independence leaders.
As for Israel, “It has a long history of assassination since before the creation of the state.”
But even there, political leadership made things “a bit more of a difficult proposition”, assesses Trenta, such as in the case of Yasser Arafat.
We can spot antecedents of this year’s decapitation tactics as far back as antiquity.
The Roman practice of “triumphs” displaying captured leaders in a procession bears a family resemblance to the US’s extraction of Maduro — a decapitation strike, indisputably, albeit not a deadly one for its target.
An image posted on Donald Trump’s Truth Social shows the president with defence secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA director John Ratcliffe and secretary of state Marco Rubio at Mar-a-Lago on January 3, during the US operation to capture Nicolás Maduro © Truth Social/AFP via Getty ImagesIn modern times, the more common use of assassinations has been against suspected terrorist leaders and, further back, heads of nationalist movements.
The US diplomat Zelikow notes the precedent against terrorism, but says that the targeting of “state leaders by a country like ours is a contemporary innovation”, and attributes the shift to the emergence of a “qualitatively different technological capability.
If states could have achieved such targeting [sooner], they would have tried to do it long ago.”
As governments have become more familiar with these capabilities, in other words, perspectives on their legitimacy have evolved — and seemingly faster and further in (some) governments than in the general public.
Trenta distinguishes three phases.
Until the late 20th century, state-sponsored assassinations would be covert operations, often carried out by proxies and with any involvement publicly denied — and condemned if exposed.
The judgments of the US Senate’s Church Committee are illustrative of the era.
In 1975, after investigating claims of American involvement in assassination attempts against state leaders and officials, the committee introduced an interim report with what was and surely remains a widespread view:
“Once methods of coercion and violence are chosen, the probability of loss of life is always present.
There is, however, a significant difference between a cold-blooded, targeted, intentional killing of an individual foreign leader and other forms of intervening in the affairs of foreign nations.”
The pressure that followed that report’s publication led to assassinations being banned by executive order, first under president Gerald Ford, then in consecutive executive orders, with one signed by Ronald Reagan still on the books.
Demonstrators in Tehran protest at the killing of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani by a US air strike in January 2020 © Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Also under the Reagan presidency, however, the official perspective on decapitation was moving towards a new phase.
There was less perceived need to deny and cover up attacks on enemy leaders, although it remained imperative to situate this within the confines of law by claiming inadvertence or self-defence — in short, not an assassination — as the US government did with the attack on Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi in 1986.
American decapitation strikes against Saddam Hussein followed in 2003.
In the third phase, which several experts I spoke to see as starting with the killing of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020 by the first Trump administration, any deference to international law has been abandoned, says Trenta.
So has secrecy.
In fact, “a big spectacle is made of [targeted killings]”, as with the strikes on boats with alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and the Maduro raid.
The best that can be said for this third phase is that any hypocrisy has now been discarded.
So why then do many of us feel unease at how this sort of conduct is becoming normalised?
What do we lose when we lose the norm?
To answer this, it is helpful to reflect on the reasons why the norm existed in the first place.
One reason was always reciprocal self-interest: if any leader is targeted, then every leader can be.
For reasons similar to other diplomatic protections for state leaders, the reasoning has been that reciprocity is better for everyone.
The norm also fits with the philosophy underpinning our four-century-old Westphalian state system, which situates sovereignty in states with a presumption of inviolability.
To go after the head of state, the personal embodiment of state sovereignty, is to undercut the foundation of the entire international system and with it the rules we have built to — however imperfectly — keep the peace.
Related to this, note that when regime decapitations are carried out, including non-lethal ones such as the Maduro raid, it is common for those involved to denigrate the status of the affected state, suggesting it has gone rogue or been captured by criminals.
And it is not a coincidence that when heads of state or government have been targeted, it has usually been in what used to be known as the third world.
There is more than a whiff of racism or imperialism in the selective respect the norm enjoyed in the first place, of the same type as has been called out in the International Criminal Court for tending to pursue the leaders of poor countries.
The price paid by the state that engages in decapitation killings is that it loses the moral high ground, points out Trenta — “but so does the international community when it refuses to say that this is wrong”.
And it is an important point: the evaporation of this norm is happening against the background of an erosion of international rules generally.
Freedman points out that in a previous period when killings of heads of state and government were common — the late 19th and early 20th century — they were often carried out by anarchists.
They were quite literally attempts at upending the existing order.
One such attempt — the murder of Austrian archduke and heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand — famously triggered the first world war.
“Maybe because of that history, even if it was tempting to seek the assassination of Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini, they weren’t.”
If one basis for disquiet that state leaders are no longer off-limits is that it heralds the end of the order we know, what order might be taking its place?
There is much talk of the return of great power competition.
But great powers have been able to sustain the norm against decapitation strikes in the past.
A more intriguing possibility is what political scientists Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman have called “neo-royalism” — an order “structured by a small group of hyper elites” where politics serves “narrow personalist interests rather than national objectives”.
While those authors focus on personalised accumulation of money and power by ruling cliques, nothing seems more neo-royalist than seeing war through the prism of the physical destruction of a rival leader.
In both cases, says Goddard, there is the “complete breakdown of norms of sovereign non-intervention, the practice that territorial boundaries are supposed to set up some firewall between international and domestic politics.
In a neo-royalist system, sovereigns do not recognise these types of limits to their power.”
There is also a breakdown of the distinction between the state and its leader — “There is no ‘national interest’, only the interests or whims of the leaders and their courts,” she adds.
Indeed, Trump has hinted that one motivation for the decapitation strike was that Iran was seeking to kill him — and “I got him [Khamenei] before he got me.”
Against all this it can be argued that what matters is really only whether decapitations work.
If they do, this would be by disorienting, dismaying and demoralising the adversary and by causing disruption, says Freedman.
It can be seen as more likely “if you think you’re dealing with an autocracy where everything depends on one man”.
It may also be seen as warranted when the threat is felt as existential, as it is in Israel, says Freedman.
“The Israeli argument is these are not normal states, they want to eliminate us, we are not going to fight clean with these guys.”
Even ethically, “if you can solve the problem by knocking out one guy rather than full-scale war, you can argue it has its attractions”.
This is reminiscent of the debate over using the atomic bomb against Japan in 1945 — that a devastating strike would save more lives by forcing a surrender quickly.
But does decapitation actually work?
“The US has not had great luck with its earlier attempts at such strikes,” remarks Zelikow.
Freedman points out that it’s hard to know what will follow.
“Who can you talk to?
The replacements may not be any better than the one you knock out.”
And if the person killed is popular, a decapitation attack could boost morale in a rally-round-the-flag fashion.
Empirical research on terrorist networks shows that a decapitation strike on such groups may often not work when they have reached a certain level of organisational sophistication, writes Jenna Jordan, the author of a book on the topic.
Indeed, “decapitation can embolden groups to launch retaliatory attacks or inspire previously passive followers to become active in the struggle”.
Trenta, too, is sceptical.
“Every time there is a counterinsurgency campaign there is a decapitation strategy,” he says.
It’s with an air of resignation that he goes on to ask: “If it never particularly worked, why are we still doing it?
But that’s true of many things.”
Martin Sandbu is the FT’s European economics commentator
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