The murder of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the end of February 2026 was not an accident of war. It was not a bomb landing wide of some legitimate military objective. It was not the old official story about regrettable collateral damage, told with the usual mournful face and the usual refusal of responsibility. It was the deliberate killing of a head of state. The reporting in The Guardian was explicit that Khamenei was the object of a long-prepared joint American-Israeli operation, and that the strike which killed him also killed other senior leaders and members of his family and entourage in a coordinated “decapitation attack.” Donald Trump then removed even the last scrap of ambiguity when he told ABC, as reported by Fox News, “I got him before he got me.” Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has since announced that any successor who continues Iran’s present policy will be “a certain target for assassination, no matter his name or where he hides.”

This matters for reasons deeper than the death of one Iranian ruler. I do not object because the person of a supreme leader is more sacred than the bodies of the girls killed when a school is hit, or the nameless civilians turned into statistics by air power. I object because the open adoption of assassination as a policy of government marks a collapse in the restraints that once made war, if never humane, at least less depraved than gang murder. When governments begin formally to hunt the heads of other governments, they do not civilise war. They degrade it. They turn conflict from a contest of states into a feud of criminal syndicates, and the eventual victims are not usually the guarded men at the top, but the ordinary people beneath them.

There is, to be sure, an argument on the other side. Why not kill the rulers? Why should old men who send the young to die remain safe behind walls and bodyguards? Why should a people suffer because its ruler is shielded by convention? Put at its most attractive, the argument is that a prince who knows he may be killed may hesitate before making war. One might even imagine a world improved if presidents and prime ministers were obliged to settle their quarrels in single combat. That fantasy has its appeal. But it is a fantasy. What happens in reality is not that war becomes personal and therefore limited. What happens is that the ruling class becomes more furtive, more insulated, more frightened, and more willing to kill pre-emptively. A regime that expects its leader to be hunted will put more distance between ruler and ruled, more steel around the palace, more surveillance on the roads, and more corpses in the approach routes. That is not a reduction in war. It is its contamination.

The old European state system understood this, even if only by instinct. Between the seventeenth century and the twentieth, wars were indeed often sordid games in which young men who had never met killed each other for the advantage of old men who had dined together. That was evil enough. But the old dynastic and diplomatic order did maintain one valuable prejudice: rulers were not generally to be hunted like bandits. Kings were enemies, but also counterparts. Cabinets might seek battlefield victory, territorial concessions, indemnities, prestige. They did not ordinarily announce, in advance and with boasting, that the sovereign himself was a lawful quarry. That restraint was not founded on tenderness. It was founded on an understanding that, once rulers become prey, negotiation collapses, succession becomes violent, and every struggle becomes existential.

The modern Americans once pretended to understand the same thing. Executive Order 12333 still states, in plain language, that no person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall “engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” That prohibition did not appear by accident. It came from the disgrace of the Cold War plots exposed by the Church Committee era and from a lingering sense that republics ought not to behave like the Borgias. Yet the words remain while the substance has vanished. The American Justice Department’s 2020 memorandum on the Soleimani strike shows how the prohibition was hollowed out: the ban survives on paper while presidents redefine targeted killing as something other than assassination whenever they find it convenient. What used to be forbidden becomes, by legal alchemy, merely another instrument in the presidential toolbox.

Qasem Soleimani was the crucial breach. On 3 January 2020, the United States killed him in a drone strike at Baghdad airport. He was not an obscure terrorist in a cave. He was a serving Iranian general, one of the most important military men in his country, and a public figure of obvious state importance. The Trump administration defended the killing as self-defence against imminent threats; later legal and academic analysis made clear how strained and opportunistic that justification was. Reuters, the BBC, NPR and the Justice Department memo are all enough to show that this was not a battlefield chance encounter but a deliberate state killing of a named senior official of another state. From there to Khamenei was not a leap. It was a progression. The line had been crossed, the moral flinching had passed, and the lawyers had done their work.

Israel, of course, crossed that line long ago and with much less hypocrisy. Since 2020 alone, Reuters and other major outlets have reported or attributed a sequence of Israeli targeted killings that reads less like statecraft than a ledger of vendetta: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020, Hassan Sayyad Khodaei in 2022, Sayyed Razi Mousavi in 2023, Saleh al-Arouri in January 2024, Fuad Shukr in July 2024, Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran the next day, Ibrahim Aqil in September 2024, and Hassan Nasrallah later that same month. Reuters has also reported Israel’s confirmation of strikes killing figures such as Mohammed Deif and its broader campaign of targeted killings in Lebanon. Whatever view one takes of those men, the pattern is plain: Israel has normalised the public killing of political and military leaders across borders, in capitals, in guesthouses, in suburbs, and in countries with which it is not formally at war.

That this policy has now reached the head of the Iranian state should surprise no one. It is the same logic with a larger victim. Khamenei’s murder was simply the most brazen version to date. Reuters describes the strike as part of a broader attack on Iran’s power structure, and legal commentary already notes how extraordinary it is that a sitting ruler was deliberately killed in this way. Vox, hardly a source inclined to tenderness toward Tehran, noted that world leaders are almost never killed in war and that the Khamenei case breaks a long-standing norm. Even where legal scholars can be found to argue that such a killing might in some circumstances fit within the law of armed conflict, that is just the problem. Law has become the hired language of moral surrender. Once one asks only whether a ruler can be characterised as a military objective, one has already accepted the gangster premise.

The defenders of assassination like to speak of decapitation. It is a revealing word. It tells us how modern states see one another: not as political communities, still less as civilisations, but as organisms to be disabled by cutting off the head. Yet states are not snakes. They are societies. Cut off one head and another emerges, often angrier, more frightened, and less manageable than the first. Reuters quoted analysts after the killing of Nasrallah to the effect that decapitation strikes rarely collapse an entrenched organisation. The same point applies more strongly to states. Kill a supreme leader and you do not abolish the nation. You intensify its rage, simplify its politics, and place power more securely in the hands of security men. The idea that one can murder one’s way to moderation is a fantasy available only to peoples who have spent too long watching intelligence thrillers.

There is a further corruption. Once a state adopts assassination as a routine instrument, its moral categories rot. If leaders are targets, why not advisers? If advisers, why not propagandists? If propagandists, why not journalists, publicists and inconvenient witnesses? Reuters reported in October 2024 that Israel named six Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza as members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, an allegation the network rejected as an attempt to justify targeting them. The Associated Press likewise reported the accusation and the lack of independently verified evidence. The Guardian has reported on the “grey zone” in which the IDF has come to treat some journalists as legitimate targets. This is not incidental to the policy of assassination. It is its natural extension. Once political enmity is enough to erase civilian status at the top, the same habit of mind travels downward.

The rhetoric that accompanies these acts tells its own story. Yoav Gallant’s “human animals” remark from October 2023 was not a slip. It was the verbal expression of a policy that depends on dehumanisation. Reuters reported a UN committee’s concern about rising Israeli hate speech and dehumanisation directed at Palestinians, while contemporaneous reporting recorded Gallant’s announcement of a “complete siege.” If the enemy is vermin or an animal, why should his leaders not be hunted? Why should his journalists not be marked? Why should his children not be incidental? Assassination is never just a technique. It presupposes a moral doctrine: that the enemy has no political personality deserving even the formal courtesies of war, only a biological existence that may be terminated when useful.

I am not here defending the Iranian regime. Khamenei may well have brought misery to many of his own people. Soleimani was no mild liberal. Nasrallah, Deif, Haniyeh and the rest were not candidates for sainthood. This is irrelevant. The point is not that the dead were good men. The point is that governments which reserve to themselves the right to murder named foreign leaders wherever they can find them are making a claim incompatible with any civilised order. They are claiming, in effect, that power itself is licence. They may drape this in human rights, counter-terrorism, self-defence, or the free world. The substance is the same. A state that openly threatens to murder the next supreme leader of another state “no matter his name or where he hides” has abandoned the language of law and reverted to the ethics of the knife.

What, then, follows if this becomes normal? A more dangerous world, plainly. Leaders will hide more deeply and trust less widely. Diplomacy will move from conference rooms to secure bunkers. Succession disputes will sharpen because the top office will attract not merely ambition but foreign missiles. States will lash out pre-emptively because delay will look like death. The men selected for power will be exactly the kind least fit to wield it: secretive, suspicious, insulated, morally numb, and ready to turn whole districts into sacrificial buffers around themselves. We complain already that our rulers are low creatures, trashy and mendacious and unworthy of command. Let them know in advance that office carries a foreign death sentence, and we shall have lower creatures still. The prudent, the sociable, the half-scrupulous, the men with some instinct for proportion, will have one more reason to stay away. The job will pass to those who can live underground and think in blood.

For this reason, the American-Israeli assassination policy deserves unqualified condemnation. It is not a sign of high civilisation defending itself. It is a sign of a civilisation that has forgotten what separated war from murder. The old restraints were never perfect, but they existed for reasons learned through centuries of European and then global statecraft. Heads of state were not sacrosanct because they were better than common men, but because turning them into prey made every conflict harder to contain. To cast that inheritance aside is not realism. It is regression.

I therefore hope this policy fails. I hope it is discredited. I hope the men who ordered and boasted of these killings live to see them judged, whether in courts or in history, as acts of state murder. A government that makes assassination its doctrine has already said too much about itself. It no longer asks to be regarded as lawful. It asks only to be feared. And fear, though useful for a season, is the most short-lived foundation of hegemony.

Further Reading

• Audrey Kurth Cronin, “The Age of Open Assassination,” Lawfare (2020). (Lawfare)
• U.S. Department of Justice, January 2020 Airstrike in Iraq Against Qassem Soleimani (OLC memorandum, released 2021). (Department of Justice)
• Executive Order 12333, “United States Intelligence Activities,” especially section 2.11 on assassination. (odni.gov)
• Sean Watts, “Assassination in the Law of War,” Lieber Institute, West Point (2021). (Lieber Institute West Point)
• Reuters, “Israel’s targeted killings in Lebanon since Gaza war began” (2024), for a concise factual overview of the recent Israeli campaign. (Reuters)
• Vox, “World leaders are almost never killed in war. Why did it happen to Iran’s supreme leader?” (2026), for a useful discussion of the broken norm. (Vox)
• Reuters, “Are the U.S. attacks on Iran legal?” (2026), for the current legal controversy surrounding the Khamenei strike. (Reuters)

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