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Succession came quickly after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death in Tehran. Around a week later, Iranian state television was announcing that the Assembly of Experts had chosen Mojtaba Khamenei, the slain supreme leader’s son, as the Islamic Republic’s next ruler. At almost the same moment, Brent crude jumped above $114 a barrel, and AP reported that Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz had all but halted tanker traffic through a route that carries about a fifth of the world’s oil. The strike that was supposed to decapitate a regime had produced an heir and an oil shock.
The left's familiar argument is that President Donald Trump and Israel crossed some new threshold by killing the head of a sovereign state. The more interesting truth is almost the reverse. Leadership targeting is not new at all. It is one of the oldest recurring temptations in global politics. What changes from century to century is the delivery system. The fantasy remains remarkably stable.
From Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships in Edo Bay to the U.S. ambush of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, from British plans to snipe Hitler to the CIA’s schemes against Fidel Castro, to Reagan’s bombing of Muammar Gaddafi’s compound, it keeps repeating: make rulers feel personally vulnerable, and politics will yield. Sometimes the tactic works. Just as often, it doesn't.
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Common Knowledge
On the liberal and center-left side, the objection to the war is not that Khamenei deserved sympathy. It is that the United States has now made the targeted killing of a foreign ruler look normal. Bill Scher, writing in Washington Monthly, said Americans should be "deeply disturbed" by what follows "the targeted assassination of a foreign leader," and argued that Trump’s expectations ignore "everything history teaches about war’s consequences." Chatham House, in a critique published just after the strike, argued that the attack was making the use of force "the new normal."
Trump himself also reduced the argument to personal vengeance and preventive violence. "I got him before he got me," he told ABC News, referring to Khamenei, and then described the resulting spike in oil prices as "a very small price to pay" for "Safety and Peace."
On much of the interventionist right, the question has not been whether killing Khamenei crossed a line, but whether it was sufficiently decisive. This is not quite the same as cheering for chaos. It is the older conservative belief that deterrence sometimes requires violence, especially against overtly hostile regimes that can mistake restraint for weakness.
The most politically consequential split is on the right itself. There was immediate backlash from Tucker Carlson and other MAGA figures after Trump launched the operation. Marjorie Taylor Greene said: "We voted for America First and ZERO wars."
That leaves Trump in an awkward place. He has tried to frame the killing as both vengeance and statecraft: Khamenei was dangerous, Iran had plotted against him personally, and removing the supreme leader was a precondition for a safer region. The facts are that Mojtaba Khamenei is now in power, Iran has continued firing missiles and drones though it has also notably apologized for doing so, and now gasoline prices may rise.
The debate is not really left versus right. One side believes that mortal enemies require targeting, and that legality and diplomacy are luxuries. The other believes that once killing the ruler becomes the first move rather than the last resort, the state has confused tactical brilliance with strategic thought. History, inconveniently, gives ammunition to both camps.
Uncommon Knowledge
So the key question is not whether leadership targeting is new. It is whether it works. The historical record suggests that the answer is more complicated. Decapitation strikes have, at times, disrupted command structures, eliminated leadership figures and created short-term confusion. But they have also repeatedly failed to deliver the larger political outcome their architects wanted: regime collapse or durable deterrence.
The early evidence from Iran already points to the core problem. Khamenei is dead, but the regime has not disappeared. It has moved to succession. The pattern is not one of novelty, but of repetition. Governments kill leaders in the hope of simplifying a conflict, and then discover that the surrounding system is harder to destroy than the person at its apex.
Perry’s Black Ships
Long before drones and cruise missiles, powerful states learned to threaten leaders without formally conquering their countries. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed a U.S. fleet into Edo Bay and demanded that Japan open itself to American commerce. The result was the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa, which ended Japan’s long period of seclusion. This was not decapitation in the Trumpian sense, because nobody was trying to kill the shogun. But it did make the people who ran Japan frightened.
That was the essence of gunboat diplomacy. The purpose was rarely annihilation. It was to create a clear link between resistance and personal risk. In that sense, the line from black ships to stealth bombers is not as long as it looks.
Operation Vengeance
In April 1943, U.S. codebreakers intercepted the travel plans of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese naval commander who masterminded Pearl Harbor, and American P-38 fighters were sent on "Operation Vengeance." Yamamoto’s aircraft was shot down over the Solomons. The United States got the man it wanted.
What it did not get was strategic transformation. Yamamoto’s death was psychologically satisfying, but Japan’s war effort did not collapse. The effect on the actual fighting in the Pacific theater was negligible.
Heydrich and Lidice
A year earlier, another leadership strike had shown a darker version of the same problem. In May 1942, Czech resistance fighters attacked SS official Reinhard Heydrich, a central architect of the Holocaust. He later died of his wounds. The operation was successful, but the retaliation was monstrous. The village of Lidice was annihilated as a reprisal.
Killing a leader may degrade command, but it can also intensify the enemy’s appetite for punishment.
Operation Foxley
The British plan known as Operation Foxley is significant for the opposite reason: it never happened. In 1944 the Special Operations Executive drew up plans to kill Hitler, most plausibly during a visit to the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, where a sniper team might have attacked him during his routine walk.
The plan did not go ahead for logistical reasons. Among its supporters were Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who dismissed objections that it would turn Hitler into a martyr. The temptation was always there.
Castro and the Bureaucratization of Murder
The Cold War turned that temptation into a routine. There were at least eight plots involving the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro between 1960 and 1965. The proposed methods ran from poison pills to poison pens to "deadly bacterial powders." Castro survived each time. But it did not stop new plots being planned and implemented.
Reagan and Gaddafi
In 1986 Ronald Reagan approved Operation "El Dorado Canyon" after a bombing in West Berlin. One of the targets in Libya was a barracks containing Gaddafi’s residential compound. He survived, until he was captured, tortured and killed in 2011 amid the Arab Spring.
George W. Bush and Saddam
In the opening of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. launched a "decapitation strike" on a site near Baghdad where Saddam Hussein was believed to be meeting senior aides and family members. The idea was to shorten the war.
It did not work that way. Saddam survived the strike, and although his government soon fell under the weight of full-scale invasion, the broader lesson was not encouraging for believers in leadership targeting. Removing the ruler did not remove the regime’s legacy, the country’s internal fractures, or the violence that would follow. Saddam was eventually captured months later, disheveled and hiding underground, and later executed.
What the Scholarship Says
The most useful corrective to both moral panic and macho certainty is that the research literature is mixed. Jenna Jordan’s Leadership Decapitation argues that the belief in killing one’s way to the end of terrorism rests "more on a foundation of faith than facts," and that leadership targeting has often been ineffective against organizations with robust infrastructure, ideology, and popular support. Patrick Johnston's work, by contrast, argues the consensus against decapitation is "premature" and that in numerous cases targeting leaders did help degrade militant groups, though not as a "silver bullet" and most effectively as part of a broader campaign.
That nuance matters. The argument is not that decapitation never works. It can work, especially against some militant organizations, especially when paired with wider pressure. The stronger claim, and the one the current war is testing in public, is that success tactically does not guarantee success strategically.
Iran Is a State, Not a Cell
Which brings us back to the present. Iran is not a fugitive terror network. It is a state with clerical institutions, a security elite, an Assembly of Experts, the Revolutionary Guard, and long-running succession politics. That is the mistake Trump may be repeating. Not the use of leadership targeting itself, which is old. But in the assumption that a regime is merely the ruler in visible form. Iran may yet fracture. Resilience is no more guaranteed than collapse. But last week’s evidence points in the opposite direction from the administration's triumphal script. The supreme leader is dead. The system is not.
The logic behind Trump’s war is not especially mysterious. It is the logic of gunboats, bombers, special operations dossiers, and drone feeds. It flatters states into believing that complex political systems can be reduced to a single vulnerable human. It promises a shortcut through history. Sometimes it even works for a while. But the historical pattern is rarely a clean victory. It is succession, backlash, and complexity—not to mention American drivers discovering that a decapitation strike in Tehran has somehow followed them home.
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