Barely a day has passed before new warnings are raised about one of the most serious developments in national security and terrorism in 2024: the worldwide epidemic of political assassinations.
In South Korea, Democratic Party of Japan leader Lee Jae-myung stabbed in the neck on January 2, apparently by an assailant with unknown motives. corruption scandal Surround Lee. The leader survived the attack.
The attempt was just the latest in a long and growing series of assassination attempts against political leaders.
August 2023, Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated in Quito by a Colombian hitman.In September of the previous year, a man with a Nazi tattoo Assassination attempt on Argentina Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, his gun just jams. That June, Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe He was killed by a lone gunman with a homemade gun, apparently because of the leader's ties to the Unification Church.
Amid recent escalations in domestic political violence, the United States has avoided successful high-profile assassinations, but not for lack of trying. Major conspiracies targeted in 2022 alone House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In both cases, the would-be assassins made it to their targets' homes. Remarkably, these incidents highlight that the threat of assassination is not reserved by any particular political ideology, but is weaponized by extremists from all walks of life. Today's American public service often includes flood of threats As an industrial accident.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to diagnose the cause of the apparent increase in assassination plots targeting different countries.
Indeed, in the United States, norms of civility are being shaken, in no small part due to a former president who seems to delight in threatening violence against political opponents. In September 2022, after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell worked with Democrats to pass a bipartisan bill, Donald Trump Posted On Truth Social, his former Congressional ally said he “has a death wish.”
Recently, Trump fuming He criticized a conversation between former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and a representative of the Chinese government after the January 6 riot, adding: “This was an act so egregious that it would have been punishable by the death penalty in the past!” . Words like this can dehumanize political opponents and, by extension, make it easier to understand the act of killing them.
Another explanation is the prevalence of conspiracy theories targeting politicians. In my new co-authored book, “God, Guns, and Instigation” explores the rise in assassination threats surrounding both the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, with both moments fueling conspiracy theories targeting Democratic (and even centrist Republican) politicians. I discovered that it had changed. surely, Gallows installed outside the US Capitol Coupled with the crowd's promise to “hang Mike Pence” on January 6, 2021, this was evidence of a growing trend.
A more worrying explanation may simply be a matter of priorities.Recent trends in terrorist tactics and targeting, such as ISIS-inspired van rammings that have hit cities such as nice and new york and the lone actors of the far right Shot fired at a place of worship, proving once again that terrorists can learn from each other. In other words, the pioneers who took the lives of Shinzo Abe and Fernando Villavicencio may have ultimately inspired others to follow in their footsteps.
With this dark possibility in mind, politicians must be prepared to spend more resources on their protection.by washington post“Candidates running for the House and Senate increased their security campaign spending by more than 500 percent between the 2020 election and the 2022 midterm elections.”
But there are also more optimistic possibilities. Assassinations are usually chosen by “accelerationist” extremists particularly anxious to change the course of history, and should therefore be interpreted accurately as reflecting the strength of the liberal democratic order. Therefore, the most important counterterrorism measure is to continue to strengthen democratic institutions, such as free elections and freedom of the press, that isolate extremism to the margins of society.
Jacob Ware is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies domestic terrorism and counterterrorism, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service and DeSales University. He is deputy editor of the Irregular Warfare Initiative and serves on the editorial boards of Conflict and Terrorism Studies and International Counterterrorism Review. He is co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published by Columbia University Press in 2024.
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