Trump puts the bad guys on notice: Don’t mess with the ‘hitman-in-chief’ | Opinion

“Hitman: Agent 47” was a fictional movie about a trained assassin who killed the Nigerian warlord Bwana Ovie before his mission to take out the Russian president. It was popularly panned, but did fantastic at the box office.

Hitman: POTUS 45 is a real-time, televised and Twittered political program where the American commander-in-chief whacks Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani before setting his sights on the next target. The reviews are still coming in, but 45 is already doing well at the fundraising box office.

Agent 47 navigated foreign cities, used stealth to deceive well-trained security forces and put himself in vulnerable positions before he could pull off the kill.

POTUS 45 had it relatively easy. He just gave an order to pull a metaphorical trigger.

Agent 47 had plausible deniability and no identity or nationality to make any single country accountable for his murderous actions.

POTUS 45 made it clear to the whole world that he alone was responsible for the American high-tech hit. As a result, his actions have made it clear to distasteful foreign leaders and adversaries sitting in an office or on a tarmac anywhere that they are fair game. If U.S. advanced military technologies can get a bead on them, they might be next.

Kim Jong Un cannot be comforted knowing that a targeted attack can snuff him wherever he sleeps. It may be one of the reasons his predecessors rarely traveled outside North Korea. Step off your sovereign territory and anything that happens to you — “accidentally” or otherwise — is no longer a direct attack against your country and might not be an act of war.

Miscalculation or a heated reaction by an aggrieved and suddenly leaderless nation could ignite a war, of course. That’s still a risk with Iran. So far, the Iranian reaction has been rhetorically hot, but practically restrained. The word from the White House? Iran “appears to be standing down.” We’ll see.

For years, the Israelis avoided taking out the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, though they likely knew his movements better than he did. The costs of eliminating him were too great. Creating a martyr and actively rallying the Middle East against Tel Aviv were highly likely and too risky. Better to have the non-telegenic, corrupt and ineffectual Arafat leading, hyperventilating and hiding than a potentially new, more radicalized, legitimated, and regionally supported one at the Palestinian helm. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. The Israelis kept him alive.

The Soleimani hit took place in a third country: Iraq. That means he was not mowed down on his home turf, just in his regional neighborhood and de facto domain. That makes no difference to the dead, but from a strategic and legal calculus, that means the United States did not attack Iran’s sovereign territory. Just its leadership.

Similarly, Iran uses both proxies and paramilitary abroad to attack military, governments and soft targets — a euphemism for innocent men, women and children. It does so with plausible deniability, whether launching attacks from Yemen, Syria, Lebanon or Iraq. It’s all part of what the Islamic Republic sees as a cat-and-mouse game allowing it to conduct low-grade lethal warfare without holding the theocratic leadership accountable or demanding strong retribution from targeted nations.

Riding the edge of outrage and testing the limits of adversaries became sport for Tehran. Destroy Saudi oil fields. Knock down American spy drones. That kind of stuff. Other countries practice this form of passive aggression. Iran has become expert. Whether on the battlefield, in urban cafes or in the deep darkness of cyberspace, Iran has freely conducted gray-zone warfare.

Early optimistic views hold that America’s Soleimani action will lead to a lull. Maybe even open a path to negotiating a nuclear freeze. But it’s just as likely a step up the escalation ladder.

Regardless, the United States has put all its unsavory and previously secure-feeling enemies on notice that it could easily unleash new lethal targeting capacities. Every foreign adversary now knows they are always in America’s sights. Make a wrong move, get a super-smart bomb dropped on your head with little to no collateral damage (another euphemism for dead innocents).

Are political leaders, representatives, military attaches, diplomats and other state assets now fair game anytime, anyplace? Or is there going to be a truce preserving the more-or-less gentlemen’s agreement that countries don’t take out other countries’ leaders? Who makes such an agreement and how does it get enforced?

Up to now, what’s kept countries from killing other countries’ leaders was deterrence and diplomacy. Tit-for-tat deterrence works, after all. Diplomacy keeps a dialogue open and its rules provide the protection needed for bad guy leaders to travel safely to Geneva or the United Nations in New York.

POTUS 45 is now America’s hitman-in-chief. Come 2020 or 2024, POTUS 46 will either double down on this policy or constrain the executive’s right to global targeted killing in the sequel.

Markos Kounalakis looks both ways before crossing. He is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

This story was originally published January 9, 2020 at 12:38 PM.