Kevin’s response is interesting, but it relies on two manoeuvres that ought to be noticed before addressing the substance. First, it replaces evidence with conjecture whenever the evidence runs out. Second, it quietly shifts the argument from principle to expediency whenever principle becomes inconvenient.

Let us take his points in order.

 

1. The July 20 bomb

Kevin argues that the explosives used in the July 20 plot may have been supplied covertly by Britain, and that the absence of documentary proof is exactly what we should expect from an intelligence operation. This is not history. It is speculation.

Historians work from evidence. The existing evidence—German testimony, Allied records, and post-war investigations—points to a very prosaic explanation: the conspirators obtained British-type explosives from captured Allied matériel that had entered German inventory. That explanation is consistent with what we know about the Abwehr’s access to seized equipment. Kevin’s alternative explanation is that Britain secretly supplied the explosives but destroyed all traces of doing so.

Perhaps. But “perhaps” is not evidence. If the standard of proof is that the absence of documentation confirms the existence of a secret operation, then any historical claim becomes impossible to falsify. One might just as easily argue that MI6 supplied the conspirators with rifles, detonators, or poison—again leaving no records behind. That is not historical reasoning. It is imaginative reconstruction.

 

2. Probability versus documentation

Kevin suggests that covert supply through Switzerland would have been safer than obtaining explosives from German stocks. Possibly. But the conspirators themselves were German officers operating within the German military hierarchy. Their safest source of matériel was the one they used: German channels that did not immediately expose them to foreign contact.

Indeed, one of the principal weaknesses of the July plot was that it relied on conspirators already embedded in the German command structure. The bomb itself was not difficult to obtain. What proved impossible was coordinating the political coup after Hitler’s death.

The historical record therefore supports the simple explanation rather than the conspiratorial one.

 

3. The supposed “fiction of clean hands”

Kevin argues that the Allies had an incentive to conceal involvement because admitting it would legitimise assassination as policy. This reverses the logic.

The Allies did not conceal involvement in covert operations during the war. On the contrary, they openly celebrated them. The Special Operations Executive proudly publicised its role in sabotage, assassination of collaborators, and resistance support across occupied Europe. If Britain had materially enabled the most famous anti-Hitler conspiracy of the war, it would have been one of the greatest propaganda victories imaginable. The notion that London would conceal such a success permanently out of moral embarrassment is improbable.

 

4. Prudence versus principle

Kevin claims that my argument collapses because it is prudential rather than categorical. But prudence is the point. Civilisation rests on restraints that are partly moral and partly practical. The prohibition against assassinating foreign leaders developed because states gradually realised that normalising such acts produced chaos. It is not necessary to argue that killing a leader is metaphysically immoral in every conceivable circumstance. It is sufficient to observe that once the practice becomes normal, every state gains an incentive to eliminate its enemies’ rulers whenever possible.

That is not a stable system. It is an invitation to perpetual covert warfare.

 

5. The “leader immunity” objection

Kevin’s aircraft-carrier analogy misses the argument entirely. Political leaders are not immune because of their physical location. They are treated differently because they represent the political continuity of the state. Killing them deliberately transforms war from a conflict between organised forces into a campaign of targeted political murder. Once that boundary disappears, retaliation becomes inevitable. Every intelligence service becomes authorised to kill foreign leaders wherever they can reach them.

Earlier generations of statesmen understood this risk and therefore avoided institutionalising assassination as policy—even during the world wars.

 

6. The case of Khamenei

Kevin argues that Khamenei was a legitimate target because he served as commander-in-chief of Iran’s armed forces. By that standard every political leader in the world becomes a legitimate target. Presidents, prime ministers, monarchs, and party chiefs routinely function as the supreme authority over their armed forces. If that doctrine is accepted, there is no longer any conceptual barrier to killing foreign heads of state.

Kevin’s argument therefore proves my point rather than refuting it.

 

7. The American Revolutionary example

Kevin cites the American Revolution, where American forces targeted British officers. That comparison again shifts the ground of the discussion. Officers in the field commanding troops have always been legitimate military targets. A colonel or general directing a battle is part of the military chain of command. Killing him during combat is not assassination.

What is new—and historically dangerous—is the deliberate killing of political leaders far from the battlefield.

 

8. The real issue: this war itself

Finally, Kevin frames the debate as an empirical question: does killing a leader improve the strategic situation? That is the relevant question. And the answer depends on whether the war itself has any coherent objective.

In the present case the conflict appears to be escalating without a clear political end-state. Air campaigns are destroying infrastructure and killing civilians. Western leaders openly boast about the elimination of foreign rulers. Yet no one can explain what stable political order is supposed to emerge from the destruction of Iran’s leadership.

A war fought without a clear plan is the sort of war in which the abandonment of restraint becomes most dangerous.

 

Kevin concludes that the debate is about prudence. On that point we agree. The prudential lesson of history is simple: once assassination becomes a normal instrument of state policy, it spreads rapidly. What begins as a tactical convenience ends as a permanent feature of international conflict. Civilisation abandoned that practice for a reason. We may soon discover why.