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.
Political leaders have a vested interest in avoiding normalizing assassinations, because they are personally at risk from them. The realest of realpolitic is looking out for your own personal neck, after all.
The CIA tried to assassinate Castro like a hundred times. Best one was exploding or poisoned cigars.
The short answer is that real life bad guy states and terrorists are not like video games where the minions all disappear when the boss dies. It’s not effective at ending the organization/state. You still need military action to kill all the regular joes, so you might as well leave the leader alive to organize a withdrawal or surrender.
When it comes to actual countries: Killing government, even evil government, results in destabilization. Even the bad guys have to get good at running supplies and food and utilities, not to mention keep all the even crazier monsters in line. So when you destabilize a country you end up with 1) Warlords 2) Massive humanitarian crises and 3) LOADS of refugees who will show up and cause your domestic conservative population to go nuts.
When you consider that assassination kinda sucks for the above reasons, add the fact that the Heads of State (or Government) of democratic countries are the most vulnerable to assassination, since they have to appear in public to campaign and win elections, so they don’t want to set the precedent that makes the practice acceptable. Meanwhile, authoritarians who don’t have to win elections tend to be selfish bastards who value their own heads more than killing their enemies, so they don’t want to open that can of worms either.
There are a couple of reasons.
1. Security is serious for heads of state and it’s difficult to pull it off.
2. It sets a precedent that it’s acceptable to assassinate opposing heads of state, this isn’t a precedent that heads of state are generally comfortable with.
3. It must be combined with having a replacement ready to go from within the existing ranks of the dictator. Dictatorships value loyalty most highly for this reason. It’s almost impossible to line up an acceptable successor without letting the dictator find out.
4. If it emerged that a state did this, it would be all-out war, and it would be very difficult for its allies to roll in behind the assassinating state.
5. Generally, the consequences are more severe for taking this action, than for letting current status continue.
Not that it hasn’t been done before – Google will give plenty of examples, but it generally is avoided due to the consequences.
How do you know the replacement wont be even worse?
I’m assuming the conversation was in regards to Putin, he is simply well protected I’m sure if he wasn’t he would have been gone a long time ago
When Caesar was assassinated, it removed Caesar from the equation. It didn’t remove the problem that Rome was critically dependent on strong military leaders to defend it against threats, but expected them to step back into the shadows after they were done, without offering them anything. It didn’t change the problem that this kind of people was painfully aware that Rome couldn’t survive without them.
So Rome still became an Empire.
The fundamental problem is that as much as they are leaders, they are often symptoms, riding a wave that doesn’t critically depend on their person. So all the assassination often does is create bad blood and delegitimize the very thing you want to achieve.
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