A story is sometimes told that at the Battle of Waterloo, a soldier came to Wellington to report that British troops had spotted Napoleon and had him in their sights across the battlefield. Could they fire at him? Wellington is said to have refused to authorise the shot. Killing the opposing commander — indeed the head of the enemy state — would have been ungentlemanly behaviour, and might cast doubt on who would have won the battle otherwise, tarnishing any victory.
The Wellington-Napoleon story may well be made up. (“Apocryphal but possible,” says Andrew Roberts, a biographer of both leaders.) But it illustrates an old question that Donald Trump has made extremely timely. When, if ever, is it an appropriate tactic of war or foreign policy to engage in a “decapitation strike” — the intentional targeted killing of the leaders of another state?
No student of history or follower of international affairs should be surprised that states engage in assassinations. Yet there seems to be something different about the explicit and indeed boastful targeting of Iran’s political leaders by the US and Israel in the latest Middle East war. The American operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January, while not a killing, shocked the world in a similar way. Both events had the flavour of a broken taboo about them.