Assassination: the political strategy nobody admits to.

Political assassination has always been an element of statecraft. But is it ever ethically justified? And does it work?

Thomas Crooks, aged 20, took a shot at Donald Trump. He missed.

As assassinations go, it was a debacle. Two people, including Crooks, died. Another two were critically injured. Trump survived, defiant and triumphant, gaining unprecedented sympathy that can only boost his campaign to return to the presidency.

If this act was politically motivated, it had – as usual – the opposite effect. Most assassination attempts – those in democracies, anyway – fail. And those that succeed almost always kill the figures who may, if they had lived, made the world a little more civilised and a little safer.

Assassination has an undeniable place in history and in politics. For the Romans, it was the favoured method of changing emperors. That model has been used frequently in India and Pakistan ever since independence in 1948 and, with the murder of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada, India’s Narendra Modi is expanding its limits. Elsewhere in the modern world, it has become rare in democratic nations but remains commonplace in autocracies. It is a standard tool-of-trade for Putin’s Russia and the Kim dynasty’s North Korea.

The attempt on Trump was quickly condemned by world leaders as being antithetical to democracy, which depends on the ballot and the peaceful transfer of power.

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence – for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception,” President Biden told the world. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

It is, perhaps, a little disingenuous. It particularly ignores the scores of assassinations planned, abetted, attempted and executed by America’s armed forces and its Central Intelligence Agency.

These include many killings, by drone strikes and more direct means, of Islamist leaders in the Middle East including, famously, Osama bin Laden. In 1986 the agency tried and failed to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator. They tried and failed to kill Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The highest US authorities approved the murder of the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1963; and multiple attempts against Fidel Castro of Cuba.

They certainly planned, and may have attempted, hits on the commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces under Allende, President Sukarno of Indonesia and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo.

Does assassination work?

“Assassination has never changed the history of the world,” said Benjamin Disraeli. He was wrong. An examination of three assassinations shows how they certainly do alter history, in each case for the worse.

1914: The Archduke

The first was the killing in 1914 of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. During a visit to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, he and his wife were shot dead by a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb, Gavril Princip.

In 1908, imperial forces had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, formalising an arrangement that already existed de facto. Until 1878, the two states had been part of the Ottoman empire but then came under Austro-Hungarian administration. Though the annexation changed little, it formed the focus of massive protest.

Serbia remained independent.

The assassination provided the spark that led directly to the First World War. The aged and inflexible emperor, Franz Josef, sent an unacceptable ultimatum to Serbia; Russia, in a pan-Slavic treaty with Serbia, stepped in; Germany took Vienna’s side; France and Britain were brought in by their treaties with Russia.

Four years of slaughter, with 40 million deaths and immense destruction, followed. The empires of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia were overthrown. The Czar and his family were killed and the Bolsheviks took over. The British empire never recovered.

The economic upheaval led to the Great Depression and the mishandling of the peace to the rise of fascism and the Second World War.

Princip

Nor did it go well for Bosnia and Serbia. Bosnians, fighting in the army of Franz Josef, suffered casualties at a greater rate than any other ethnic group in the Hapsburg empire. Savage vengeance was exacted against Bosnian Serbs: around 5,500 were arrested, and between 700 and 2,200 died in prison. 460 were executed.

Serbia’s victory was Pyrrhic. The Serbian army suffered the greatest casualty rate of any nation on either side: 243,600, or 58% of the army, died. Those killed and wounded accounted for 16% of the national population.

The twentieth century might have been a better time for Serbia, Bosnia and the world if Franz Ferdinand had lived and become Emperor on the death of his father, Franz Josef, in 1916.

Although firmly conservative, he was far less inflexible than his father and took a much more benign attitude to Serbs. He wanted more autonomy for Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, and fought strenuously against hard-liners in his father’s administration, warning that  harsh treatment of Serbia would bring Austria-Hungary into open conflict with Russia, to the ruin of both empires.

1968: The candidate for President

On 31 March 1968, Lyndon Johnson, embattled by the unending Vietnam war and fearing he would not survive another term as US president, called it quits. In a television address he said: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Fifteen days earlier, Robert Kennedy had announced he would run for president and after Johnson’s announcement quickly attracted massive support across the country, particularly from the young, in primary campaigns to become the Democratic nominee for that year’s presidential election.

At the centre of Kennedy’s pitch was the promise to end the war and bring home American troops – by then numbering 536,000 – from Vietnam. But his agenda was much wider, encompassing racial equality, economic justice, decentralization of power, social improvement at home and non-aggression abroad.

On 4 June, Kennedy won the California and South Dakota primaries. His journey to the nomination, and from there to the presidency and the promise of an American renewal, seemed unstoppable.

But an assassin stopped all that. After addressing the crowd from a hotel balcony, he walked through the kitchen and was shot dead by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian.

The eventual Democratic nominee was Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s staid and uninspiring vice-president who was closely identified with the increasingly unpopular war. On election day, the presidency went to Richard Nixon.

Although Nixon promised to bring the war to an end – “peace with honour”, he said – the reality was different. Some troops were brought home but the bombing campaign continued and intensified. As US morale collapsed among troops in Vietnam and the population at home, Nixon secretly authorised the bombing of targets in Cambodia being used by the North Vietnamese to bring weapons, supplies and personnel into the south.

In 1970 the neutral Cambodian president, Prince Sihanouk, was deposed by a US-backed general, Lon Nol, who undertook a campaign of internment and massacre of Vietnamese. North Vietnam invaded and put the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, into power. And so the killing fields began, as the Khmer Rouge pursued a vast program of murder.

By January 1979, the Pol Pot regime had killed between 1.5 million and 2 million people, including 200,000–300,000 Chinese Cambodians, 90,000–500,000 Cambodian Muslims and 20,000 Vietnamese Cambodians.

Of the 196 prisons operated by the regime, the most notorious was Security Prison 126. Of the 20,000 people incarcerated here, seven survived. The victims of such prisons were taken to fields nearby and killed, often bashed to death to save bullets. These became known as the Killing Fields.

Eventually, in 1978, the Vietnamese – having won their own war – invaded again and installed Hun Sen. That regime, now led by Hun Sen’s son, remains in power.

At home, chaos grew under Nixon. In May 1970, soldiers of the Ohio National Guard shot at unarmed anti-war protesters at the Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine. On 28 May 1972, six months before a presidential election, a group of bumbling Republican operatives burgled the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington. Details of the scandal and its subsequent cover-up emerged only after Nixon had won a second term; but the political conflagration destroyed Nixon’s career and did immeasurable and lasting harm to the presidency.

Finally, on 9 August, Richard Nixon resigned.

If the bullet the killed Robert Kennedy had not been fired, it is likely that none of these things would have happened. Almost certainly, he would have prevailed over the unpalatable Nixon at the polls, ended the war, Cambodia would not have been destabilised, the civil unrest in the US, Australia and around the world would have ended, South-East Asia would have had a better chance of peace, and millions of lives would have been saved.

Robert Kennedy’s death came during a period of six years which formed one of the bloodiest and chaotic periods in American history.

Seven key civil rights leaders were shot dead: Medger Evers in 1963; James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who tried to encourage black Americans to vote, died at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan; the Klan also killed Vernon Dahmer, a black civil rights organiser in Mississippi.

Then came the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1968 and Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers in 1969.

One far-right leader also died: George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party in 1967.

President John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963 and his assailant, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed while in custody two days later.

America has never fully recovered from the trauma and madness of this period.

Bobby Kennedy’s death, and the consequent failure to end the Vietnam war, also had indirect but profound effects on the global economic system. In 1944 a conference at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire met to design a system of monetary management for the postwar decades ahead. The key figure was the British economist, Maynard Keynes.

The Bretton Woods system, as it became known, put the US dollar at the centre of international exchange rate settings. The agreement required countries to peg the value of their national currencies to the US dollar; in turn, the US guaranteed that its dollar would be convertible to gold at the fixed price of US$35 an ounce. This allowed nations some leeway to adjust exchange rates as conditions demanded, and enabled international currency trading.

It worked because the US had the financial heft to keep its own currency stable. But the soaring costs of the war made the system untenable. In 1971, Richard Nixon ended the US convertibility guarantee. National currencies were left on their own, and the postwar period of stability ended.

The effects of assassination are unpredictable but can linger far into the future.

The Prime Minister

At his trial, Sirhan Sirhan explained that he had shot Robert Kennedy because of America’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. “I can explain it,” he said after his arrest. “I did it for my country.”

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organisation and its offshoots conducted a long and bloody campaign of terror against Jewish, Israeli and western targets. There was a string of aircraft hijackings and killings of Jewish civilians in Israel and abroad; the culmination was the assault on the Israeli compound at the Munich Olympics in 1972, where two athletes were killed and another nine taken hostage.

The terror campaign failed utterly. Rather than drawing international sympathy for the cause of dispossessed Palestinians, the world condemned and shunned the PLO and the people it claimed to represent. But the entrenched hatreds on both sides delayed serious peace negotiations for another two decades.

In 1993, many – though by no means all – on both sides were weary of conflict and were ready to find a way out of the mess. And so the process which eventually produced the Oslo Accords was able to begin, brokered by the United States and Norway.

The first Accord, signed in Washington that year, was a framework for peace that allowed for the creation of a self-governing Palestinian Authority. The second Accord, signed in Egypt in 1995, called for “peaceful coexistence, mutual dignity, and security, while recognizing the mutual legitimate and political rights of the parties.”

The main protagonists, PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, loathed one another. But they both saw the urgent need of both their peoples, and the entire region, for peace and security. Bill Clinton persuaded them to shake hands for the cameras. Rabin, Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, and Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. At the ceremony, Rabin said: “Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.”

There was passionate opposition among both populations: the fears and hatreds were deep and lethal, and the sight of Rabin shaking hands was anathema to right-wing Israelis.

Yigal Amir

The crunch-point came with the Accords’ second tranche in 1995. Rabin, the region’s key peacemaker, was shot dead in Tel Aviv by a right-wing extremist, Yigal Amir. Much of the Israeli nation mourned; leaders from around the world attended the funeral; but the peace accord died with Rabin.

The Prime Ministership passed to Peres, who held the post for only seven months before the right-wing Likud Party prevailed at the 1996 general election. Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister and the quest for peace foundered. Hamas and Hezbollah grew and prospered, backed by Iran. Israel, backed by the United States, became ever more intransigent.

The slaughter in Gaza is only the most recent manifestation of the hatred and chaos that could have ended but, because of three bullets from an assassin’s gun, did not.

Aaron David Miller, a former Middle-East peace negotiator with the US State Department, was a colleague and friend of the Prime Minister. “Rabin’s murder on 4 November 1995 traumatised a nation and killed a peace process,” he wrote in Foreign Policy.

“Tragically, it did more than that: his assassination both reflected and accelerated a process of polarisation and deepening anti-democratic and messianic tendencies that would help drive Israeli domestic and foreign policy ever rightward.”

“I remain convinced,” said Bill Clinton in 2017, “that had he lived we would have achieved a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians by 1998 and we’d be living in a different world today.”

A most uncertain technique

There have been many assassinations and assassination attempts. A large study collected data on all publicly-reported assassination attempts for all national leaders since 1875. This produced 298 attempts, of which 59 resulted in the leader’s death.

“Whether the attack succeeds or fails in killing the leader appears uncorrelated with observable economic and political features of the national environment,” the authors wrote.

“We find that assassinations of autocrats produce substantial changes in the country’s institutions, while assassinations of democrats do not.

Even there, the technique carries immense risk: “In particular, transitions to democracy … are 13 percentage points more likely following the assassination of an autocrat than following a failed attempt on an autocrat.”

The ethics of assassination

Is the removal of a political leader by assassination ever morally and ethically justified? There is a decent argument that it can be, in certain circumstances. The clearest example is that of the 23 documented attempts on the life of Adolf Hitler. Some were planned but never carried out; all failed. But the success of any of them would have saved the lives of millions.

Two of these attempts stand out: a time-bomb planted in a Munich beer hall in November 1939 exploded successfully. It killed eight people and injured 62 others – but Hitler had left early. The unsuccessful perpetrator died in 1945 at the Dachau concentration camp less than a month before Nazi Germany’s surrender.

The most famous attempt was the Wolf’s Lair plot by Wehrmacht officers, led by Claus von Stauffenberg, in 1944. Stauffenberg put a brief case containing another time-bomb on a conference table in Hitler’s military headquarters and then, wishing to save his own life, left the room. The briefcase was removed from the table and, when it exploded, Hitler suffered only minor injuries.

The plotters aimed to remove the Nazi government, establish a ready-made provisional replacement acceptable to the Allies, and conclude a peace before the Russians entered German territory.

If it had succeeded, the peace settlement would probably have followed similar lines to that later imposed on Japan: a pacifist constitution and the return of democratic freedoms.

In the United States, the executive order on the subject seems unequivocal:

No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

But this is an executive order, not a law. Several attempts in Congress to enact such a law have failed. It could be overturned by any president at any time, and there are important loopholes. According to a 1992 paper from the Cornell International Law Journal, a president could:

• Declare open war;
• Interpret certain criminal acts as legitimating self-defence;
• Narrowly construe the executive order; or
• Repeal or amend the order, or permit Congress to do the same.

The first three of these loopholes have allowed successive presidents, notably George W Bush and Barack Obama, to conduct widespread and often-indiscriminate assassinations of Islamist leaders in the Middle East. Many of these were conducted by drone strike, with substantial civilian casualties which went unreported – or, at best, under-reported – in western media. These attacks have also powerfully increased anger among ordinary people in the affected countries against the US and its allies.

The 9/11 attacks led to the triumph of gung-ho neo-conservatives in the George W Bush administration that produced not only two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but also to torture, imprisonment without trial, “rendition” of prisoners to secret locations in authoritarian ally countries such as Egypt, and extra-judicial killing.

A contemporary paper by a lieutenant-colonel and issued by the Army War College put the case somewhat chillingly:

“Assassination is an ages old tool that has been used by some militarily weak nations against stronger opponents. Critics of the use of political assassination contend that those that would use this method are immoral.

“This is an overly idealistic view. The strategic application of assassination to cause political or social change, or strike emotional, if not physical fear, in the target or enemy force so as to steer behaviour in the direction of the desired political or social outcome is realistic and as this paper will argue, legal and moral.

“Viewed in this unemotional manner, political assassination is but one weapon of many available to national leaders to use to attain national security objectives.”

Perhaps the most cogent argument against assassinations is that they have a very strong tendency to make everything much, much worse.