Being a Hard Target on an Assassination Planet

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

Following on yesterday’s newsletter, I want to envision the direction that the United States, Israel and Russia are all in their way pushing us towards, namely an international system in which there are no inhibitions against kidnapping enemy leaders or targeting them for assassination both during times of active hostilities and otherwise.

It is not that the interstate system of the Cold War was scrupulously free from one state’s leadership committing to the murder of leaders or perceived enemies in another country. Belgium and the United States at the very least approved of the murder of Patrice Lumumba. The United States also had numerous plans for killing Fidel Castro. The Soviets didn’t hesitate to kill dissidents abroad if the chance arose—that was not Putin’s innovation. However, there were both laws and norms restricting such actions, which pushed plans of this kind into the realm of the covert as well as imposing fairly stringent tests for perceived necessity.

The inhibitions started to fall away with Putin’s embrace of murders and attempted murders that were essentially signed in radioactive materials, “From Vlad, With Hate”. George W. Bush and Barack Obama worked together to create new doctrines permitting the President of the United States to order the death of specific individual enemies outside of the United States, including targets who were American citizens. Even before Hamas’ attack on Israel in 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had expanded the targeted killing of individual enemies, and since that time, that approach has turned into an enthusiastic embrace. And now we have Trump, who has accepted what I yesterday called a decapitationist military doctrine with no limitations or concerns, giving the American military unlimited authorization to capture or kill the leaders of governments targeted by the Administration.

For now, let’s leave aside any lengthy discussion of why that is almost certainly a bad practical idea and why it is a morally catastrophic vision of our global future.

Today, I want to think as global governments will have to think if interstate violence fully normalizes capturing and killing the civilian and military leaders of governments and perhaps even influential intellectual, religious or cultural leaders. Why stop at generals and presidents, after all?

What should you do as a leader or an influential national citizen to keep your head on your shoulders?

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We must start by noting that no matter what leaders in an assassinating world might do to protect themselves, getting killed or captured is a near inevitability if you are in a confrontation with a government or a supranational alliance whose military and intelligence capabilities are several magnitudes or more than your own. Just ask El Mencho. Even with extraordinary precautions, any human being who maintains some measure of a human life with family and friends will someday be vulnerable to attack by drones, by bombs, by special forces, and so on. Ergo, it is still important to pick your battles and de-escalate your conflicts in a timely manner if you have some degree of accurate intelligence about your real strengths vis-a-vis a possible or probable adversary.

Which leads to the next problem: personalist rulers of almost every variety and flavor are as good as dead in an assassinating world unless they are the rare sort who rewards honesty, requires competence, and restrains themselves from excess and corruption. A personalist ruler full of egotism and delusion won’t see a real threat coming because no one in their inner circle will feel safe to share the bad news and because their state will have minimal or atrophying capacity that is overly focused on the authoritarian’s inner circle. Authoritarians in weak states can usually defend themselves against their own populations (military coups being an exception) but not against bigger enemies. And yet, as Phil Haun points out in Coercion, Survival and War (thanks, Paul Musgrave!) many weak states headed by personalist authoritarians do resist threats from powerful countries like the United States. Before now, successfully, but maybe in the new assassination world order, less so.

So we arrive at recommendation #1: Operating from ideology and ruling by a highly systematized command and control structure is the first step to being a hard target. If killing one leader just means there’s another like-minded leader who will step quickly into place because there’s a vacancy, you might discourage an enemy state from thinking there is anything to gain by killing a leader. The more ambiguity and chaos might follow on a decapitation strike, the more attractive it might seem to be as an option for an unprincipled and chaotic enemy who is looking to flex their assassinating muscles.

Recommendation #2 follows from that. Contra Machiavelli, it might be better to be loved than feared. E.g., if a leader is both replaceable by someone who will reliably continue the leader’s policies but also is someone with the strong support of a large majority of the population, then the unprincipled leader-killers may have further reason to think there is little point to dropping the bombs or sending in the special forces.

At this point, dear reader, you are doubtless saying, “But wait, who would want to kill a well-loved leader who represents an ideology with majoritarian support and who is backed by an efficient and well-designed civil service and military? Surely the new decapitationist order will only want to kill bad authoritarians that everyone hates?” Let me say this much without going into detail about the ghastly moral abyss that is Trumpism. I would not care to rely for one minute on Trumpism and any regimes which follow on its example showing any principle in their selection of targets. Today, the bombs fall on Iran, but Trump has given the world every reason to fear that someday he might send the helicopters to roust Mark Carney from his bed in Rideau Cottage or drop bombs on Avaaraq Olsen’s house in Nuuk. The legitimacy and continuity of a government is protection against sudden attack but it is not an ironclad security against it.

So recommendation #3: Acquire or build the best air defense system you can afford, and make sure qualified and highly-trained people are operating it 24/7. Extra protip hint: don’t buy it from a potential assassinating regime. The higher your chances are of bringing down attacking bombers, drones and low-flying aircraft carrying special forces, the more a killer regime might hesitate a little bit.

Recommendation #4: Be very careful about travelling outside your country. Be even more extra very careful about travelling to the United States (or another assassinating power) on official business. Because a government that thinks nothing about dropping bombs to kill leaders and kidnapping leaders might eventually wind its way around to “welcome to New York City for the upcoming United Nations meeting, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to put you in a maximum security prison instead because that’s what we want to do”. That’s unprecedented in the modern interstate system, but we’re not in Kansas any longer. Kidnapping visiting dignitaries was a much more common thing in previous time periods: European settlers and colonial administrators used to do it frequently to Native American leaders, for example, and medieval Europe was replete with kidnappings and killings of rival dynastic leaders.

Recommendation #5: Yeah, fortify where your leaders sleep. Yeah, change locations pretty often. Yeah, build deep tunnels that make it harder for a surveilling decapitationist to know where leaders are at any moment. Yeah, use disinformation to create confusion about location. A fair amount of what’s been standard in security for many governments for years, but step it up a little with the expectation that you might be dealing with bombs, drones, or special forces, especially if your neighbor is an assassinationist regime. Protip hint: don’t trust those pagers you bought cheap, and watch out if the tunnel contractors are from a multinational corporation. Do what you can with your own people first. Boost employment at home, always a good thing.

Recommendation #6: Better be sure that you can trust everybody in your government’s inner circle. Check those bank accounts! Infiltrate those cellphones! (Unfortunately, the best tools for a lot of this activity come from companies associated with one of the countries most likely to kill foreign leaders, so…maybe cultivate and hire your own designers. Protip hint: don’t ask Claude to build you tools for surveilling your own government. Just remember that even a trusted associate might decide that if there’s an enemy trying to kill many of you, he’d rather cut a deal with the enemy to kill just you in return for telling the enemy where you are.

Recommendation #7: Optional only for expert survivors! Build a retaliatory capability that can survive your death. Play that Prisoner’s Dilemma, make your killers spin the wheel to find out what they brought on themselves. Or you can just count on the fruits of martyrdom and leave it to posterity—if you execute well on recommendations 1 and 2, hey, it should take care of itself, your government and your people won’t let it end there. But even so, they’ll be grateful if you’ve got a big old hardened base full of drones ready to go. And hey, if your country is sitting on top of some really valuable resources that your killer wants? Be sure to booby trap the extractive infrastructure and blow it to smithereens if it seems like it’s curtains for you. Scorched earth FTW, baby.

Recommendation #8: Build alliances of national leaders and influential citizens that feel the same way you do. Don’t make that a secret, because after all we learned in World War I that secret treaties for mutual defense are a bad idea. Make it explicit: an assassination to one is an assassination to all! Make the world more dangerous for dangerous regimes!

Recommendation #9: Avoid all dealings with a known killer regime. Certainly don’t rely on them for military protection or vitally needed supplies. You may think you’re safe, but the more they know about you, the more vulnerable you might be if things change, especially if their ruler is erratic and capricious.

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Does this sound like a good international order? Some of it, after all, is already the world that national leaders generally live in terms of practices of their security details and the availability of fortified shelters.

But on balance, no, this doesn’t seem good at all.

Too bad. It’s the one we are living into March 2026.

Do these shifts seem like the way we want political leaders of nation-states to operate within their own territories and on a global scale? Very much not.

Too bad.

Image credit: Blast tunnel in the Diefenbunker. By Jonathon Simister - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17661839