I thought about this when a coworker mentioned in casual conversation that they wondered why a certain head of state (no reason to get into specifics) is not simply done away with to resolve a currently ongoing international conflict. To my knowledge that’s almost never done in the real world because it rarely works as intended. I was wondering if any politics/international relationship experts or avid Hitman/Assassin’s Creed players knows the real reason why this is, and if there’s even a official term for why this is not done in real politics? Thanks.
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The people who would make such a decision are the ones who have the most personal interest into not setting such a precedent.
If the ruler of country A ordered the assassination of the leader of country B, it would be the equivalent of them saying that assassinating heads of state including themselves is acceptable.
Even if a leader were willing to paint a target on their own person, all their peers who are the leaders of other countries have a vested interest in such practices being taboo.
That does not mean that it doesn’t occasionally happen.
During the cold war it was rather common for the US and to a lesser degree the USSR to get rid of the leaders of other countries. But it was always the governments of other ‘lesser’ countires not anyone considered an equal.
Democratically elected leaders like Patrice Lumumba and Salvador Allende were rather ruthlessly eliminated for by people who might or might not have been associated with the CIA.
The Soviets did similar things in places like for example Afghanistan.
When Kennedy was shot the Soviets were extremely eager to prove to the US that it wasn’t them, because they understood that this would be an unwelcome escalation.
So less powerful countries and their leaders are fair game but not anyone you see as a peer with a chance of retaliating in kind or escalating to something worse.
However most of the time all assassinating a leader does is create instability and chaos.
From a realpolitik point of view that might be what you want, but more often than not you want stability not chaos.
In today’s geopolitics stability is the goal more often than not.
Everyone gets richer from stability, especially those already rich.
In this case you can’t just assassinate a leader but have to finance and train people to coup them and replace them. (This is why the US has the school of the Americas.)
If you were to for example try to forcibly enact a regime change in North Korea. You would have to contend with the issue of a retaliation in kind (like happened in the 1968 raid on the South Korean Blue house.) Military escalation (flattening Seoul with artillery strikes) and in the best case scenario the regime simply collapsing and millions of refugees from NK going to China or SK in search of a better life and causing a huge economic impact in those countries.
Nobody wants that not China, not South Korea and not anyone else who wants to buy another smartphone in the near future.
Assassinations are great for causing chaos but bad for business.
So assassination is less common today because everyone wants stability and nobody wants to declare open season on heads of state, least of all other heads of state.
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