07/16/26

7/16/2026

Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of Iran, vows revenge on the “criminals” who assassinated his father, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had led Iran for 36 years.

It must be assumed that, although this statement didn’t specifically identify President Trump by name, that is who he meant, along with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Trump is the target named on the placards carried by thousands of Iranian mourners at the Ayatollah’s funeral service. Mojtaba Khamenei’s message promised that revenge must certainly be carried out, and soon.

Well, of course. What else would be expected? Tit for tat. Kill our leader, we will kill yours. Does anyone think Iran’s regime would settle for anything less?

Assassination attempts against American Presidents by foreign enemies, surprisingly enough, have not been unusual, especially since the end of World War Two. No such attempt has yet proved successful, many of them being discovered before they were initiated. 

Four of America’s 47 Presidents—Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963)—were assassinated, all by domestic killers.

Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a bitter Confederate loyalist, just five days after Robert E. Lee’s military surrender. The Confederacy considered itself an independent nation, of course, so it could be argued that Lincoln was killed by a “foreign” assassin, although winning that argument would be a tall order.

After reams of reports and dozens of investigations, today’s consensus is that John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone, without assistance from any foreign power. There is reasonably strong evidence that Cuba’s Fidel Castro knew of Oswald’s plan, but did nothing to facilitate it.

The United States, on the other hand, since 1945 has been complicit in the deaths of a number of foreign heads of state, generally through CIA operatives, and failing in several other attempts. 

Among the successful head-of-state deaths were Patrice Lumumba (Congo) in 1960, Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) in 1961, Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam) in 1963, and Salvador Allende (Chile) in 1973. All four, including Diem, were responses to America’s fear that international communism could succeed there unless the U.S. helped to change regimes it considered weak and vulnerable to communist takeover.

To the list of foreign coups facilitated by America, importantly, should be added the coup that overthrew popularly elected Premier Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran in 1953. Mossadegh was placed under long-term house arrest. Iran harks back to that event as a seminal cause of its enmity toward the United States.

The CIA was also involved in a number of unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Premier, later President, Fidel Castro of Cuba over a period of many years after he assumed the leadership of that nation in 1959. American sources confirmed at least eight tries; Castro’s government claimed many times that number. Some of the methods considered were truly bizarre, but none succeeded.

In the wake of the public outrage that followed the Watergate scandal and the failure of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, the U.S. Senate authorized the Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, to investigate the CIA’s role in foreign assassination attempts. The committee turned up a number of instances of such activities, and President Gerald Ford in 1975 issued an executive order that forbade assassination of heads of state as a tool of American foreign policy. President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan issued similar orders during the next few years.

Reagan’s order, similar to the others, included the following wording: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” However, the order has been interpreted to allow the President to order military engagement against combatant forces that threaten the security of the nation or its citizens.

So is a foreign head of state of a nation involved in military action with the U.S. fair game for assassination? That’s a fuzzy situation: is a head of state a civilian or a combatant?

In recent years most American Presidents have left no doubt about what they think: killing a foreign supreme leader is fair game. Witness Trump’s targeted assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei at the start of combat initiated by the United States 4 1/2 months ago. 

In that regard, America now does in the open what it had tried to do surreptitiously decades earlier. 

Donald Trump appears now to bear the same target on his back that he is willing to place on his counterparts elsewhere. That comes as no surprise in the geopolitics of the 21st Century.