When did targeting another country’s leadership become normal?

No, it is not normal. But the threshold has shifted enough that we might not even flinch if one leader began speaking of sending another’s severed ear in an envelope to NATO.

I do not want to talk about rules of engagement, military self-defence or the laws of armed conflict. I want to focus on the deliberate targeting of another country’s leadership through assassination, decapitation or, at times, kidnapping, and how it has become normalised.

New York Tribune, June 29, 1914.

There once was the assassination of a Ferdinand, if you might remember. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand. We all know the spiralling conflicts and the great war that came after. The crises that ensued led to a war that reordered the balance across Europe and beyond. One act, and a sequence no one could fully contain. A historical juncture that changed the power configurations of the world.

Since then, there was, for a long time, a tacit understanding that assassinating another country’s leader was considered off limits, not out of restraint but …