Walt: Let me point to one other thing that I think people sometimes forget about, and that’s that we’ve seen, I think, a pretty dramatic erosion in the normative environment surrounding the use of force. And I’m a good realist, so I don’t think norms in international law are everything, but they’re not irrelevant. So one of the things we’ve seen is essentially a collapse of the norm against assassination. For a long time in world history, governments didn’t try to assassinate each other. Leaders of other countries didn’t try and kill each other in conflicts. This was a common practice 500 years ago, and it gradually fell from favor and a norm emerged against it. You can understand why. It was in everybody’s self-interest if you were a king, if you were a prime minister, not to be trying to kill each other. Moreover, great powers liked this norm because it meant that conflicts would be decided on the battlefield where they had all the soldiers and all the wealth and could win. Assassination is a tool of weaker powers. […]
And beginning at the end of World War II, when the Allies began to hold leaders accountable, Nuremberg Trials, the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, this idea that what you did as a statesman was sort of separate began to erode. Once that began to erode, then going after a leader, going after Muammar Gaddafi, going after Saddam Hussein begins to look morally preferable. Why not just take out this troublesome leader as opposed to fighting?
Carlson: Spare the population.
Walt: Yeah, spare the population. You could make this argument. Of course, this is a very dangerous road to go down because now it’s becoming a much more common practice. Look at what the United States and Israel do at the beginning of the Iran War. They take out all of Iran’s senior leaders. There’s at least 2 problems here. First of all, you don’t know who’s going to replace them. And of course, we’re now having trouble with a more hardline faction in Iran. It also erodes any possibility of trust. I mean, how can you sit down and negotiate a agreement with a regime that has killed your senior leaders and might do something again subsequently. And then finally, as that norm begins to erode, others are going to use it too. Others will start using similar tactics, and leaders, including American presidents, are going to have to worry much more about this than they did necessarily in the past. Läs intervju