On January 3, 2026, more than 200 US special operations forces, led by Delta Force and inserted by Night Stalker helicopters flying at 100 feet over the Caribbean, descended on Fort Tiuna, Caracas’s fortified military complex. President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were pulled from their compound before they could reach the steel door of a safe room. By 3:30 AM, they were out of the country. By midday, Maduro was in a DEA field office in New York, charged with narco-terrorism, heading to a Manhattan federal courtroom. The operation was codenamed Absolute Resolve. No American was killed.
Fifty-seven days later, on February 28, 2026, President Donald Trump gave the order to proceed with Operation Epic Fury from Air Force One while flying to Corpus Christi, Texas. At 2 AM EST, he posted an eight-minute video to Truth Social announcing what he called “major combat operations.” The United States and Israel launched nearly 900 strikes in the first 12 hours against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile stockpiles, air defenses, and leadership. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in his compound in Tehran. His defense minister, IRGC commander, chief of staff, and dozens of other senior officials died in the same opening salvo. Khamenei’s wife, daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law were also killed.
Taken together, these two operations represent something new in the history of American power: not just the use of force, but the open, unapologetic normalisation of leadership elimination as a primary instrument of foreign policy. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius captured it plainly: decapitation is emerging as the American way of war.
The Logic of Decapitation Strategy
Decapitation strategy, the deliberate targeting of an adversary’s top leadership, rests on a specific logic articulated most clearly by American political scientist Robert Pape: an organisation’s leadership is like a body’s brain. Destroy it and the body dies. Isolate it and the body is paralysed. Confuse it, and the body is uncontrollable.
Military planners have long been drawn to this logic because it promises quick resolution at lower cost than conventional war. Todd Turner of the US Army War College has summarised the case for targeted killing as follows:
- It supports limited boots-on-the-ground operations
- It minimises conventional casualties
- It reduces financial costs
- It denies adversaries safe havens
The appeal is obvious. The history is more sobering.
The Legal Architecture Being Dismantled
The United States is not legally permitted to assassinate foreign leaders. Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, states explicitly: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassination.”
This was not a novel restriction. It traced to President Gerald Ford’s 1976 order, following the Church Committee’s documentation of CIA plots against foreign leaders including Fidel Castro, and was tightened further by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 before Reagan reaffirmed it. The order existed because Congress had concluded, with documented evidence, that state-sponsored assassination undermined American credibility, destabilised the international order, and opened American officials to reciprocal targeting.
What changed was not the law, but the interpretation. Government lawyers, from the Clinton administration onward, began distinguishing between “assassination,” which remained prohibited, and “targeted killing” of enemy combatants in an armed conflict, which they argued was not the same thing. The Obama administration formalised this in a legal memorandum that explicitly permitted impinging on another state’s sovereignty if the state was “unable or unwilling to mitigate the threat emanating from its territory.” Under this framework, US targeted killings of alleged terrorists rose from 48 under President George W. Bush to 353 under President Barack Obama.
The killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad Airport by US drone in January 2020 pushed the doctrine further. A senior state military official of a country with which the US was not formally at war was eliminated by executive order, justified as anticipatory self-defence against an imminent threat. Congress was not consulted in advance.
Operation Epic Fury moved the doctrine to its logical terminus. A sitting head of government was killed in a strike the president ordered without a formal congressional declaration of war, with only a War Powers notification and a Gang of Eight briefing. Oman’s foreign minister had publicly stated, just 24 hours before the strikes began, that a diplomatic breakthrough was within reach, and that Iran had agreed to halt uranium enrichment above civilian levels and accept full IAEA verification. The bombs fell anyway.
Three Dangers the World Must Name
The Centre for International Policy, in a detailed legal analysis published days after the Iran strikes, put it directly: Operation Epic Fury is not an aberration. It is the latest and most severe instance of a deliberate, escalating pattern, a new operational norm in which the United States reserves to itself the right to use lethal force anywhere, against anyone, for purposes it defines unilaterally, accountable to no external legal authority.
Three distinct dangers deserve clear articulation.
The precedent it sets for every other powerful state. The United States has now established in practice, whatever its legal arguments, that a sufficiently powerful country may kill a foreign head of state if it judges that leader to constitute a threat. China, Russia, and others are watching. The principle that sovereignty protects heads of state from elimination is not a courtesy to dictators. It is a structural restraint that protects leaders of every country, including democracies, from the logic of preemptive killing. Once that principle is operationally abandoned by the most powerful actor in the system, it is abandoned for everyone.
The strategic record of decapitation does not support the theory. The United States removed Saddam Hussein and produced a multi-decade insurgency, hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and a regional vacuum filled by the Islamic State. It facilitated the killing of Muammar Gaddafi and produced a failed state that remains in conflict 14 years later. It killed Osama bin Laden and Soleimani without ending the organisations they led. CIA assessments before the Epic Fury strikes warned that Khamenei’s most likely successors were IRGC hardliners, not reformists, and those assessments have been validated. On March 3, 2026, Mojtaba Khamenei, the Supreme Leader’s son, reportedly elected under open IRGC pressure, was named as his father’s successor. Iran is not a more moderate country for having lost its leader. It may be a more dangerous one.
The absence of any plan for what follows. When asked who the United States would negotiate with once the bombing campaign ended, President Trump said: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress the United States would “finish its demolition of the regime and then gauge the prospects for political reconstruction.” As Ignatius has rightly concluded, this is a triumph of tactics over strategy: knock it down and then think about how to rebuild is not statecraft. It is improvisation with catastrophic stakes, conducted on 90 million people.
The Civilian Cost That Cannot Be Footnoted
Iran, as of the writing of this article, has launched retaliatory missile and drone strikes against US military bases and allies across at least nine countries: Israel, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
- The US embassy in Kuwait was struck
- An Iranian warship, IRIN Dena, was sunk by a US Navy submarine torpedo off the coast of Sri Lanka, a vessel that had participated in India’s MILAN 2026 multilateral naval exercise days earlier
- A Kuwaiti F/A-18 shot down three American F-15Es in a friendly fire incident
- More than a thousand people are dead
- Hundreds of thousands of travellers are stranded across a paralysed Middle East
- GPS jamming has disrupted over 1,000 commercial ships in the region
The girls’ school in Minab deserves to stand alone for a moment. At least 160 children between seven and twelve years old were killed in a strike on a school building adjacent to an IRGC naval base in Hormozgan province. The United States said it would investigate. Israel denied involvement. The investigation’s outcome has not been publicly confirmed.
A war justified by its architects as targeting a regime that oppresses its own people began with the killing of more than 160 of those people’s children. This is not a paradox unique to this conflict. It is the recurring, empirically documented reality of airpower-based regime change: the people you say you are liberating absorb the largest share of the destruction.
What the World, and India, Must Reckon With
India occupies a distinctive position in this moment. It is simultaneously a country with deep strategic partnerships with the United States, a major trading partner of Iran, a country that depends critically on Gulf stability for 8 million of its citizens’ livelihoods, and a country whose diplomatic tradition is rooted in the principle of sovereign equality and non-interference, the very principles now being operationally dismantled by Washington.
India condemned the Venezuela raid as a violation of sovereignty. India has not yet spoken with equivalent clarity on Iran. It should.
Not because Iran’s leadership was admirable. Not because Maduro was not a criminal, given he was indicted on serious charges. But because the world India wants to live in, a multipolar world governed by rules rather than raw power, in which medium and large states can chart independent foreign policies without fear of military elimination, is being actively constructed or destroyed right now, in the choices that every significant country makes about whether to treat these events as exceptional or normal.
The Non-Aligned Movement, which India helped found, was built on precisely this insight: that a world in which the strongest state reserves to itself the right to remove any government it dislikes is a world in which no government is truly sovereign.
The Global South has watched two of the three countries most prominently targeted by US force in the past decade, Iraq and Libya, become arenas of chronic instability. Venezuela’s future, with the United States having announced it will “run” the country during a transition period, is uncertain. Iran, a country of 90 million people with a sophisticated military, a history of resilience, and an IRGC that has now buried its supreme leader, is unlikely to emerge from this war as a democracy. It is more likely to emerge angrier, more militarised, and with a new leadership that has every strategic incentive to acquire the nuclear deterrent that might have prevented the strikes.
That is the deepest irony of Operation Epic Fury. It was launched, in significant part, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Its most likely long-term consequence is to make the case for nuclear acquisition self-evident to every government on earth that does not already possess them.
The Lesson Every Capital Is Drawing
Kim Jong-un is reportedly intensifying his security posture in the wake of the Iran strikes, according to South Korean analysts at the Seoul-based Institute for National Security Strategy. The lesson is not irrational. North Korea watched what happened to Iraq after Saddam Hussein gave up his weapons of mass destruction programme. It watched what happened to Libya after Muammar Gaddafi surrendered his nuclear ambitions and normalised relations with the West. It is now watching what has happened to Iran.
Every government without a nuclear deterrent is running the same calculation. Decapitation as a normalised American strategic tool does not produce a more peaceful world. It produces a world of accelerated nuclear proliferation, hardened bunkers, and leaders who conclude that the only reliable protection from American power is the one thing American power cannot conventionally overcome.
This is the strategic inheritance of normalising targeted killing as foreign policy: not a world made safer by the removal of bad actors, but a world made more dangerous by the lesson those removals teach.
The Quiet Obligation
There is a temptation, particularly in democracies that share American values and broadly align with American interests, to look at the specific targets, a drug-trafficking authoritarian in Caracas and a theocratic Supreme Leader who funded proxy armies across the Middle East, and conclude that the outcomes, whatever their methods, were net positives.
This temptation should be resisted. Not because the targets were innocent. But because the question of whether the world is safer is answered not by the identity of this week’s target, but by the rules, or absence of rules, that govern the next one.
Executive Order 12333 exists because a functioning republic concluded, with evidence, that a government authorised to kill foreign leaders without legal constraint becomes something other than what it claims to be. That conclusion was not naive. It was hard-won.
The international community has institutions, the United Nations Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the frameworks of the laws of armed conflict, that are imperfect, often paralysed, and routinely manipulated by powerful states. But they represent the accumulated attempt of the post-1945 world to build structures that constrain raw power, protect sovereign equality, and create the conditions under which smaller states can exist without perpetual fear of elimination.
Those structures are being stress-tested in real time. Their resilience depends not on American restraint alone, given that restraint has demonstrably collapsed, but on whether the rest of the world, collectively, clearly, and without the diplomatic ambiguity that powerful states rely on, says: this is not acceptable, not because of who died, but because of what is being normalised.
The arches of American power have never been more visible. The question is whether the world has the clarity, and the courage, to say what they are being used to build.
Key Facts
- Operation Absolute Resolve, January 3, 2026: Delta Force raid on Fort Tiuna, Caracas. Nicolas Maduro and wife Cilia Flores captured and flown to New York to face narco-terrorism charges. No American fatalities. Condemned by the UN and multiple US allies as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. Delcy Rodriguez sworn in as acting president. Maduro pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court on January 5.
- Operation Epic Fury, February 28, 2026: Joint US-Israel strike campaign against Iran. Nearly 900 strikes in the first 12 hours. Supreme Leader Khamenei killed in his Tehran compound. Dozens of senior officials, including the defense minister, IRGC commander, and chief of staff, killed. Khamenei’s wife and family also killed. A girls’ primary school in Minab struck, with at least 160 children killed.
- Iran’s retaliation targeted US bases and allies in at least nine countries. More than 1,000 people dead. A US warship sank an Iranian naval vessel. GPS jamming disrupted over 1,000 commercial ships in the region.
- Legal basis: Trump used a War Powers notification and Gang of Eight briefing. No formal congressional declaration of war. The strikes came 48 hours after Oman reported a diplomatic breakthrough on Iran’s nuclear programme.
- Succession: Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the killed Supreme Leader, was named new Supreme Leader on March 3, reportedly under IRGC pressure. CIA had predicted hardliners would take over.
- Executive Order 12333: Signed by Reagan in 1981, it explicitly bans US government employees from engaging in or conspiring in assassination. Government lawyers have carved out “targeted killing” of enemy combatants as legally distinct.
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