Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 57: Liquidating tomorrow – When states kill possibility, not persons

Amid the Iran conflict, Israel has avowed it will kill leaders yet unknown – a revolutionary, open-ended warrant for lawless execution. German schoolmasters of an earlier dispensation indulged the cruel sport of asking pupils in final examinations which disease had carried off Julius Caesar. The trap was designed to expose as a fool the candidate who could not answer, proof enough that Caesar’s assassination remained common knowledge long after antiquity itself had vanished. In the postmodern age of unbounded electronic warfare, extrajudicial killing has assumed a more sinister, revolutionary form: not a mere relapse into barbarism , but a novel, mutant paradigm of violence that exceeds even the egregious transgressions of pagan antiquity. Ex ante execution: The grammar of a novel transgression There are pivotal moments in geopolitics when language itself begins to signal a deeper rupture. Israel ’s lethal rhetoric emerges as a revealing instance. Along a fatal arc of escalation, the Jewish State has crossed from killing subordinate commanders to eliminating the very apex of its adversaries’ leadership – first in Lebanon , then in Gaza , and ultimately in Iran , where sovereignty was reduced to a target and the supreme leader to a mark. More ominous still are the announcements: Jerusalem has signaled that succession itself would not be spared, that even those yet unchosen are already slated for death. A declaration that a state will kill not merely its enemies, but its enemies-to-be, that is, future officeholders not yet chosen, not yet acting, not yet accountable, inaugurates a moment of disjunction in the form of a stark conceptual shift: from targeting individuals to targeting roles, and the very idea of succession. At its core, Israel ’s posture can be characterized as a doctrine of pre-emptive or anticipatory assassination: Whoever becomes the next leader is treated as a legitimate target, regardless of his identity or individual conduct.

Read more Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 33: Israel’s pyrrhic victory lap – The fatal quest for Neo-Canaan This stance falls within what security analysts more broadly subsume under the rubric of leadership decapitation strategy, the deliberate elimination of command figures to provoke internal succession struggles, disrupt decision-making, and send an unmistakable deterrent signal to adversaries. Yet the novelty of what may be termed “expectant extrajudicial elite execution” (EEEE) lies not in the removal of senior decision-makers as such, but in the extension of that logic forward in time, rendering the future occupant of the supreme office a present target. This is where the standard security frameworks start to fray. Because once the threat applies not to a person but to a position, it becomes something more radical: anonymous role-based targeting. In the case of such proleptic condemnation, violence is no longer justified by what a concrete individual has done, but by what future helmsmen are presumed to become. It is an institutionalized policy of unconstrained assassination and collective punishment transposed to leadership in the abstract, because the threat attaches not to a specific actor, but to the office itself. From a legal standpoint, especially under human-rights law, such a posture can be categorized as an especially grave form of state-sponsored terrorism, precisely because such extrajudicial killing not only bypasses due process, but also severs punishment from individual culpability. Supporters, however, invoke a different vocabulary, reducing such depersonalized, role-based assassination to mere deterrence signaling or psychological warfare: an attempt to make supreme authority so hazardous that no aspirant of ordinary prudence would accept it. On this account, the strategic logic of elite deterrence seeks to magnify the hazards of political ascendancy to the point where s