Opinions
Programmes
Author
David Howarth
David Howarth is Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. He was MP for Cambridge between 2005 and 2010, when he served on the Constitutional Affairs and Justice Select Committees and then as Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, and a UK Electoral Commissioner between 2010 and 2018. His research covers constitutional law, private law and legal design.
Photo credits: Patrick Gruban, CC BY-SA 2.0
Donald Trump’s assassination of the Iranian tyrant Ali Khamenei is, beyond any reasonable doubt, a violation of international law. It is contrary to the UN Charter’s prohibition of the use of force in international relations. It is also a violation of a specific international treaty, which the USA has ratified, the 1973 New York Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, which defines heads of state as “internationally protected persons” and says that signatory states must make illegal the “intentional commission of .. murder, kidnapping or other attack upon the person or liberty of an internationally protected person”.
Trump’s supporters will argue that the UN Charter and the New York Convention apply only in peace time and that a foreign leader is a legitimate target in wartime. But that argument fails if launching the war itself is unlawful, as the US attack on Iran most obviously is. Iran was not attacking the USA or Israel or even threatening an immediate attack on them. No UN Security Council resolution supports the attack. And Iran cannot be accused of conducting genocide within its territory, which might have triggered an international responsibility to protect the victims of genocide. Iran’s brutal and murderous suppression of dissent is an outrageous violation of its population’s human rights, but that is not the same as genocide.
Trump himself, together with his equally lawless advisers who believe that might makes right and that international law is not real law, cares not at all about any of that. His UK sycophants, the Conservative Party and Reform UK, are equally hostile to international law, being obsessed with ‘foreign judges’. But the question is whether the civilised world, the world outside the sphere of influence of Trump and his Putinista fellow travellers, should continue to care about assassination being against international law. After all, some might ask, would it have been so wrong to assassinate Hitler before the second world war broke out?
The main reason international law forbids state-sponsored political assassination is the same as the reason that it forbids the use of force in international relations more generally. Violence breeds violence. War breeds barbarism. Yes, war might sometimes be necessary to prevent further violence and further barbarism, but that in no way justifies setting off a new round of killing, which is what Trump did.
What followed Trump’s attack perfectly illustrates the point. The US attacks Iran. In response Iran, without any justification, attacks several Gulf states. That attack results in appeals to the Gulf states’ allies, including Britain, to protect them. Britain keeps the process going by deciding to cooperate with the original aggressor. The situation is beginning to resemble the start of the first world war.
The United Nations Charter is also a monument to the rejection of fascism, and in particular fascism’s glorification of war. Fascists saw war as an affirmation of virility and as sacrifice, to be embraced and promoted, not avoided. Admittedly, the USA is no longer committed to rejecting fascism. For Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary “of War”, to be fixated on a masculinist “warrior ethos” and for him to say, with the full support of the US president, “We’re going to go on offence, not just on defence” is the opposite of anti-fascist. But for those of us who still believe that the right side won in 1945, the UN Charter remains overwhelmingly important.
Tony Blair’s challenge to those of us who marched and spoke against his Iraq War was to ask whether we wanted to see an evil dictator, who had murdered thousands of his own citizens, stay in place. Of course we didn’t. But we also didn’t want to see major powers endorse methods of violence that later dictators just as malign as Iraq’s dictator would gladly adopt, dictators who now cry hypocrisy if we object to their methods. Putin cites Iraq as a precedent for his invasion of Ukraine.
Trump supporters, with the British Conservatives among the most prominent, have immediately turned to Blair’s Iraq argument. The answer is the same as it was in 2003.
A subsidiary reason for not resorting to assassination of foreign heads of state as a tool of international relations is that often it is a very stupid thing to do. C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute. Assassination is an application of Stalin’s maxim “Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.” But often death only makes the problem worse. Given Shia Islam’s devotion to the cult of martyrs, Khamenei’s assassination provides an opportunity for the Iranian regime to recover some support among the population.
Assassination is also stupid because it implies acceptance of a great man theory of history, or at least an evil genius theory of history, under which conflicts between countries result not from differences of interests and values that suffuse large sections of their populations, but from troublesome, destructive individuals without whose meddling no conflict would persist. But conflict between Iran and the USA under Trump is not just about the personality of a few leaders. It is about resources, especially oil, domination of the supply of which Trumpians identify as a central strategic goal for the USA. It is also about ideology and about identity and allegiance. Those conflicts will survive the death of Khamenei. They cannot be eliminated by drones, rockets and guided bombs.
The evil genius theory of history also often fails because of what Max Weber called ‘the routinisation of charisma’. ‘Charisma’, according to Weber, is a set of extraordinary personal qualities that draws people to follow a particular person and to allow themselves to be dominated by that person. This can happen in politics or in religion, or, as in the case of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, both at the same time. Charismatic authority tends to be unstable, subject to sudden reversals and losses of faith, and it is particularly vulnerable at the point of succession, when the original leader dies or retires and a new person, who will almost certainly lack the extraordinary personal qualities of the first leader, takes over. Destabilising a regime by removing a charismatic leader by force therefore has some prospect of success at an early stage, but regimes can overcome this vulnerability by transforming the original leader’s charismatic authority into a different more stable form of authority. In particular, they can surround the process of succession with rules and practices the intention of which is to relocate authority into institutions and away from individual people. The aim is to transform charismatic authority into a legal or bureaucratic form of authority or, if it succeeds several times, into the authority of tradition.
In 1989. Iran successfully transferred power from the original, charismatic leader of the revolution, Khomeini, to Khamenei, whose extraordinary personal characteristics were less evident, but who could bathe in some of the remembered charisma of his predecessor and could benefit from being appointed through a legally identifiable process. Authority came to adhere to the office of Supreme Leader rather than to the personality of the holder of the office.
Iran is now in the process of using the established process to choose a new Supreme Leader, whose connection to the charismatic leader of 1979 will be even less than that of Khamenei but who will benefit from nearly four decades of further institutionalisation. Precisely because Khamenei was not a charismatic leader, it will be easier, not harder, for power to pass to the next leader. It will not be entirely without risk, since it is only the second time it has happened and it is not yet a tradition, but it is straightforward enough to make one suspect that Khamenei’s assassination will make little difference to the prospects of regime change.
All Liberals of course want the Iranian theocratic tyranny to fall soon and Iran to transition to a less oppressive form of government without having to go through a civil war. But Trump’s assassination of Khamenei, as well as risking, in Trump’s own phrase “World War Three”, makes such a transition no more likely and might even have made it less likely.
This blog was first published by David Howarth on Substack.