I agree that it should be those at the top who face mortal risk for their own warmongering. As System of a Down said, "why don't presidents fight the wars? Why do they always send the poor?"
The incentives question is not so simple. In the short to medium term, they are good, but in the longer term it would (a) disincentivize people who aren't maniacs from taking political authority thus increasing the total number of leaders who are whackjobs and (b) incentivize creating assassination-proof regimes, which are probably worse because they require deeper institutional entrenchment.
I understand the force of the argument, especially the moral discomfort with leaders externalizing the costs of war onto young conscripts while insulating themselves from personal risk.
But I think the harder question is what kind of moral order is created once assassination becomes an accepted instrument of political judgment. The issue is not only whether a particular leader is more culpable than a particular soldier. The issue is whether we want a world in which political authority, military guilt, legal process, intelligence claims, and moral desert are collapsed into a single permission to kill.
From my own framework, the danger is substitution. The leader becomes “the cause of the war,” the soldier becomes “less culpable,” the act becomes “efficient,” and the human, legal, diplomatic, and institutional realities get compressed into a clean moral equation.
That compression is tempting because war is horrifying. But the fact that war produces obscene moral tradeoffs does not mean every cleaner-looking shortcut is actually morally cleaner. Some shortcuts do not solve the disorder. They teach the world a new way to institutionalize it.
There was a brief moment in European history where the gentlemanly norm of not sniping at officers coexisted with rifled firearms that made sniping at officers pretty easy, but it was brief for all the obvious reasons. Then officers stopped leading from the front so much, their uniforms were stripped of their more decorative elements to make them harder to see, and it just sort of faded into the background as just another tactical consideration in the art of war.
As soon as it becomes relatively easy to assassinate sovereigns, we should expect it to inevitably become a normal part of warfare, and for sovereigns to run their countries out of bunkers, flying command centers, submarines, etc…
We literally killed all the the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Did it help?
All that happened is that their replacements decided they were in an existential struggle and figured they would take high risk gambles like closing the straights because what did they have left to lose.
There have been several attempts on Trumps life and it's only made him stronger. If one succeeded MAGA would benefit.
DO I have to remind anyone that assassinating the archduke Ferdinand didn't exactly work out well for the serbs.
You seem to be assuming that assassination is *effective*, and that the only objection is moral.
But its actually been really ineffective. A lot of problems are due to forces that go beyond one person, and so taking out one person doesn't address those forces.
Maybe the trick is meeting you in the middle with something like a "yoink" rather than a "frag." Venezuela seems to be doing fairly well without Maduro, but they could always have him back if they want!
Obviously, there can be effective assassinations. But the crux of this article is that its the "one weird trick" that could solve most of the world's problems if only we were based enough to do it, which I don't buy.
Woooorrd. Also who exactly enforces "International Law?" The concept itself is a joke to me.
I agree that it should be those at the top who face mortal risk for their own warmongering. As System of a Down said, "why don't presidents fight the wars? Why do they always send the poor?"
The incentives question is not so simple. In the short to medium term, they are good, but in the longer term it would (a) disincentivize people who aren't maniacs from taking political authority thus increasing the total number of leaders who are whackjobs and (b) incentivize creating assassination-proof regimes, which are probably worse because they require deeper institutional entrenchment.
I understand the force of the argument, especially the moral discomfort with leaders externalizing the costs of war onto young conscripts while insulating themselves from personal risk.
But I think the harder question is what kind of moral order is created once assassination becomes an accepted instrument of political judgment. The issue is not only whether a particular leader is more culpable than a particular soldier. The issue is whether we want a world in which political authority, military guilt, legal process, intelligence claims, and moral desert are collapsed into a single permission to kill.
From my own framework, the danger is substitution. The leader becomes “the cause of the war,” the soldier becomes “less culpable,” the act becomes “efficient,” and the human, legal, diplomatic, and institutional realities get compressed into a clean moral equation.
That compression is tempting because war is horrifying. But the fact that war produces obscene moral tradeoffs does not mean every cleaner-looking shortcut is actually morally cleaner. Some shortcuts do not solve the disorder. They teach the world a new way to institutionalize it.
There was a brief moment in European history where the gentlemanly norm of not sniping at officers coexisted with rifled firearms that made sniping at officers pretty easy, but it was brief for all the obvious reasons. Then officers stopped leading from the front so much, their uniforms were stripped of their more decorative elements to make them harder to see, and it just sort of faded into the background as just another tactical consideration in the art of war.
As soon as it becomes relatively easy to assassinate sovereigns, we should expect it to inevitably become a normal part of warfare, and for sovereigns to run their countries out of bunkers, flying command centers, submarines, etc…
We literally killed all the the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Did it help?
All that happened is that their replacements decided they were in an existential struggle and figured they would take high risk gambles like closing the straights because what did they have left to lose.
There have been several attempts on Trumps life and it's only made him stronger. If one succeeded MAGA would benefit.
DO I have to remind anyone that assassinating the archduke Ferdinand didn't exactly work out well for the serbs.
You seem to be assuming that assassination is *effective*, and that the only objection is moral.
But its actually been really ineffective. A lot of problems are due to forces that go beyond one person, and so taking out one person doesn't address those forces.
Maybe the trick is meeting you in the middle with something like a "yoink" rather than a "frag." Venezuela seems to be doing fairly well without Maduro, but they could always have him back if they want!
Obviously, there can be effective assassinations. But the crux of this article is that its the "one weird trick" that could solve most of the world's problems if only we were based enough to do it, which I don't buy.