Has assassination as state policy made a return?

Britain’s soon-to-be-ex prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is so harmless and ineffectual that it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to kill him, but somebody in Russia apparently did. On Monday, two foreign construction workers were found guilty in London’s Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court) of setting fire to two homes and one car that were once Starmer’s.

Their information was years out of date (although Starmer’s sister-in-law and her family were still living in one of the houses), and the arsonists were both ignorant and gullible. They were ‘disposable agents’, hired online on Telegram to do a simple attack: no training, money paid in crypto, no knowledge of who hired them or who the target was.

These days lots of killings are ordered this way, and often it doesn’t annoy the person who paid for the hit even if it fails. It still spreads fear and suspicion, keeps the other side busy, and creates opportunities for online conspiracy-mongering. (Russian bloggers immediately claimed the attacks were done by ‘rent boys’ trying to collect an unpaid debt from Starmer.)

The British police got onto this one early, so they soon had the names of the arsonists (Roman Lavrynovich, Ukrainian, and Stanislav Carpiuk, Romanian), and of their handler at the Russian embassy in London, Evgeny Lyukshin. He’s protected by diplomatic privilege, and Stupid and Stupider will go to jail, but nobody is making a big fuss about it.

That’s not good, because a foreign power trying to kill your country’s elected leader should cause a big fuss. Something is changing in the world, and not for the better.

Assassinating the head of state was once commonplace in European politics — King Henri IV of France survived 20 assassination attempts before succumbing to the 21st in 1610 — but they were almost always carried out by the ruler’s own subjects or citizens, not by foreigners.

The Bolsheviks killed the Russian Czar after the First World War, but they were revolutionaries; other leaders on the losing side just went into exile. By the early 20th century even domestic assassinations were getting rare, and the idea that you could also order the killing of other countries’ leaders had completely gone out of style.

The rule even held throughout the Second World War, with no government directly targeting the leader of any other during the war, not even Hitler. Afterwards the surviving leaders on the losing side were tried for war crimes and many were executed, but that was justice at the hands of an international court, not murder.

It felt like human civilization was actually getting to grips with its old addiction to violent solutions, and a new constraint called international law was protecting the weak from the whims of the strong quite a lot of the time. Even winding up the European empires was done with relatively little violence, and wars of conquest seemed to be a nightmare from the past.

Well, we know better now. There are several wars of conquest underway that could end up in major border changes imposed by force, and the notion that assassinating the leaders of other countries is against the rules is withering away.

There is a very important distinction at risk of being lost here. Murder is bad and murder for political ends is doubly bad because it affects far more people, but state-sponsored murder of the leader of another country is a whole different level of crime. If it becomes normal and acceptable, then we are back in the Dark Ages politically. That’s not a good place to be.

Look at it this way. If mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin had continued up the highway to Moscow and killed Vladimir Putin in 2023, it would have been a major crisis for Russia but probably a relief for most other people.

If an American cruise missile or an assassin working for the United States had killed Putin, however, there would have been a global crisis and conceivably a world war. Once that box is opened you don’t know what is coming out, but you probably won’t like it.

Yet that is what Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu did last February. They murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader but almost all the other senior members of the government, and killed many of their families as well, in a surprise attack while they were pretending to be in a negotiation with them.

Am I the only one who sees this as a precedent that sets the world on a new and potentially lethal course? Even if Trump’s war had been legitimate and ultimately successful (neither of which is the case), can the minor advantage conferred by that brutal ‘decapitation’ of the entire Iranian leadership ever justify the long-term damage done by this precedent?

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.