“Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water.” – Albert Einstein
Contrarian Views
The temporal dissonance that surrounded Epic Fury—the ferocious and decapitating strikes reportedly directed at the apex of Iran’s political-military hierarchy, including its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and senior defense figures—generated a palpable sense of unease across the global commentariat. Intellectuals, journalists, and academics alike appeared unsettled less by the violence itself than by its timing, which seemed to defy the logic of diplomatic sequencing. The disquiet was captured with characteristic clarity by Fareed Zakaria on his CNN program GPS, where he posed a question that cut to the heart of the matter: how could a military action of such finality be reconciled with the contemporaneous assurance, offered by an Omani official involved in the negotiations, that talks between the United States and Iran were proceeding with steady and measurable progress?
The apparent contradiction was stark. Only a day after the diplomatic signal of cautious optimism, the military die was cast, with consequences that, at least symbolically, appeared to sever the head of the Iranian regime. This was rendered even more perplexing by the earlier declaration of President Donald Trump in the summer of 2025 that Iran’s nuclear threat had already been “obliterated” by American air power. If the strategic objective had indeed been achieved, why persist with further strikes aimed at eliminating the regime’s senior command structure? The persistence of force, after the proclaimed attainment of its primary goal, suggested that the campaign’s true purpose lay elsewhere.
Zakaria’s inference—that the ultimate aim was regime change—thus gained traction. Yet this conclusion exposed a fundamental strategic paradox. Regime change, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, is not an artefact that can be manufactured by air power alone. Bombardment may degrade capacity and terrorize leadership, but it cannot implant legitimacy, nor can it manufacture political consent. Durable political transformation must germinate internally, emerging from social, economic, and institutional pressures within the state itself. President Trump nonetheless chose to address the Iranian people directly, urging them to seize what he described as a final opportunity to overturn their rulers—an appeal that underscored the tension between external coercion and internal agency.
Alongside this line of reasoning emerged a seemingly specious , though not entirely dismissible, argument. According to this view, President Trump was acting less as an impulsive tactician and more as a grand strategist acutely conscious that the only peer competitor confronting the United States in the long term is China. From this perspective, Iran was not the endgame but a critical node in a broader geoeconomic contest. China’s energy security depends significantly on supplies originating in, or transiting through, politically vulnerable regions, including Venezuela and the Persian Gulf. By destabilizing Iran, the argument goes, the United States could imperil the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz, thereby tightening an already constrictive grip on China’s energy lifelines—much as Washington had previously sought to do in relation to Venezuela.
Whether this reasoning is ingenious or merely ingenious-sounding remains open to debate. What is beyond dispute, however, is that it raises a question of profound contemporary relevance. In an era marked by the diffusion of artificial intelligence, autonomous and semi-autonomous lethal drones, and precision strike capabilities accessible to a widening circle of states, do the cases of Iran and Venezuela risk becoming precedents rather than exceptions? If targeted decapitation, economic strangulation, and technological warfare are normalized as tools of statecraft, other states may be tempted to emulate these methods, eroding already fragile restraints on the use of force. The true legacy of Epic Fury may therefore lie not only in its immediate geopolitical shockwaves, but in the precedential signal it sends to a world in which power is increasingly exercised remotely, algorithmically, and with diminishing regard for the long-term architecture of international order.
The Discussion
To interrogate the proposition that contemporary great-power strategy may legitimately rely upon the elimination of political leadership, the constriction of energy arteries, and the manipulation of maritime chokepoints in order to discipline a rival power is to confront, at its core, the moral exhaustion of realism when divorced from law. The claim that such methods are necessary, inevitable, or even effective rests upon an assumption that power, once sufficiently concentrated, may substitute for legitimacy. This assumption has surfaced repeatedly in international relations, and it has failed with remarkable consistency.
If one accepts, purely for analytical purposes, the narrative that the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei forms part of a broader architecture of pressure aimed at constraining the energy security of China, then the inquiry must move immediately beyond the tactical to the normative. The legality of such an act cannot be assessed in isolation, because the act itself is meaningful only insofar as it contributes to a strategic logic that purports to justify exceptionalism. It is precisely this logic that international law was designed to resist.
Realism, in its classical articulation, proceeds from the premise that states act primarily to preserve power and survival in an anarchic system. Law, in this view, is epiphenomenal—useful when it aligns with interest, ignorable when it does not. Yet even the most sophisticated realists have acknowledged that unrestrained power undermines the predictability upon which strategic calculation depends. Norms are not sentimental accretions; they are stabilizing devices. When realism treats them as expendable, it corrodes the very environment in which rational statecraft can occur.
International Law
Targeted killing of political leadership outside an active armed conflict represents one of the clearest fault lines between realism and legality. International law does not recognize the category of “strategically inconvenient leaders” as lawful targets. Sovereignty is not conditional upon ideological acceptability. To argue otherwise is to resurrect a pre-Charter conception of international relations in which might confers moral entitlement. The post-1945 legal order explicitly rejected that conception, not out of naivety, but out of experience.
What makes leadership assassination especially corrosive is its asymmetry. It presupposes a hierarchy of lives, where the decision-maker reserves unto himself the authority to extinguish political agency elsewhere while immunizing his own. Such asymmetry cannot be universalized without collapsing into chaos. If every state claimed the right to eliminate leaders deemed threatening to its interests, the category of sovereignty would lose all coherence. The fact that some states possess the capacity to do so does not endow them with the right.
The realist defence of such acts often invokes deterrence: the notion that exemplary force will discourage adversaries and induce compliance. Yet deterrence theory, properly understood, depends on clarity, proportionality, and mutual recognition of red lines. Assassination undermines all three. It introduces ambiguity rather than clarity, escalation rather than restraint, and denial rather than acknowledgment. Moreover, it personalizes conflict in a manner that is strategically counterproductive. Systems endure the loss of individuals far more readily than they endure the erosion of legitimacy.
The Normative Argument
This brings us to the instrumentalization of energy flows as a mechanism of coercion. Energy, unlike armaments, is not consumed solely by states; it is consumed by populations. Strategies that aim to constrict access to oil and gas therefore operate not merely at the level of interstate rivalry but at the level of human vulnerability. From a normative standpoint, this raises questions that realism habitually evades: who bears the cost of pressure, and by what moral authority are those costs imposed?
Sanctions regimes directed at energy producers such as Venezuela and Iran have been justified as non-violent alternatives to war. Yet when such regimes are integrated into a broader strategy of maritime dominance and leadership elimination, their character changes. They become components of a comprehensive coercive environment that approximates siege. International humanitarian law has long recognized that sieges implicate civilian protection, even when conducted without direct kinetic engagement. The absence of bombs does not negate the presence of harm.
The legal framework governing maritime transit further complicates this picture. The Strait of Hormuz is not the sovereign property of any single power. The regime of transit passage reflects a collective interest in uninterrupted navigation through international straits. When naval presence is calibrated to induce uncertainty rather than ensure safety, law is subverted through indirection. This form of coercion is particularly insidious because it cloaks power in legality while emptying legality of its substance.
The Philosophical Aspects
From a philosophical perspective, such strategies reflect a utilitarian calculus stripped of moral constraint. Ends are privileged over means, and harm is justified by reference to abstract future benefits. Yet the moral tradition underlying international law has consistently rejected pure consequentialism. The prohibition on aggression, the protection of civilians, and the immunity of non-combatants are not contingent rules; they are categorical restraints. To erode them is not to adapt law to reality, but to surrender reality to force.
The realist rejoinder is that rivals do not play by the rules, and that unilateral restraint invites exploitation. This argument, while intuitively appealing, conflates prudence with permissiveness. Law does not demand self-destruction; it demands proportionality, necessity, and accountability. The claim that rivals disregard norms does not license their abandonment. On the contrary, it heightens the responsibility of powerful states to demonstrate that restraint is compatible with strength.
The fixation on President Donald Trump as the architect of such strategies risks obscuring a deeper continuity. Trump’s rhetoric was distinctive, but the structural logic of energy leverage and maritime control predates and outlasts any single administration. What distinguished the Trumpian moment was not invention, but candour. The transactional worldview that treated alliances, norms, and institutions as negotiable instruments was articulated openly rather than obscured behind diplomatic language.
Yet candor does not confer correctness. Indeed, it often exposes contradictions that careful phrasing conceals. The assertion that China represents the sole rival worth constraining ignores the plural nature of systemic challenge. Climate instability, technological fragmentation, and normative erosion pose threats no less profound than geopolitical competition. Strategies that prioritize rivalry over resilience may achieve short-term leverage while accelerating long-term instability.
Moreover, the assumption that constricting energy access can decisively cripple China underestimates both adaptation and interdependence. China’s diversification of supply routes, investment in strategic reserves, and acceleration of renewable capacity reflect an awareness of vulnerability that has already shaped policy. Coercion, rather than inducing capitulation, often accelerates autonomy. History suggests that states subjected to external pressure rarely abandon core interests; they reconfigure their means.
The normative failure of great-power realism lies precisely here: it mistakes compulsion for control. Control implies durability, predictability, and consent, however grudging. Compulsion produces resistance, innovation, and eventual backlash. Law, imperfect as it is, offers a framework for managing rivalry without collapsing into zero-sum escalation. To discard it is not realism; it is impatience masquerading as strength.
The deeper philosophical issue is the erosion of responsibility. When power is exercised through deniability—through proxies, sanctions, ambiguity, and narrative—the locus of accountability dissolves. Harm becomes diffuse, causation contested, and remedy elusive. International law’s insistence on attribution and responsibility is not pedantic; it is essential to moral agency. States, like individuals, cannot be absolved of consequences simply because causation is indirect.
If the alleged killing of a leader and the strategic manipulation of energy chokepoints are normalized as acceptable tools of rivalry, the precedent will not remain confined to any single dyad. Other powers will emulate, adapt, and escalate. The result will not be a stable hierarchy, but a fragmented order in which every vulnerability becomes a target. In such an environment, even the most powerful states become less secure, not more.
The tragedy of great-power realism is not that it recognizes conflict, but that it resigns itself to it as a permanent condition ungoverned by principle. International law does not promise harmony; it promises restraint. It does not deny rivalry; it civilizes it. To abandon that project in pursuit of advantage is to misunderstand both law and power.
Ultimately, the question is not whether China is a rival, nor whether energy and maritime routes are strategically significant. Both propositions are self-evident. The question is whether rivalry must be prosecuted through methods that corrode the normative order upon which global stability depends. The answer offered by realism is yes, or at least inevitably so. The answer offered by law is no—not because states are virtuous, but because unrestrained power is self-defeating.
The most dangerous illusion in international affairs is that legality is a luxury afforded only in times of peace. In truth, it is most necessary precisely when power tempts itself into excess. To kill leaders, choke energy flows, and weaponize commons in the name of rivalry is not to secure the future; it is to mortgage it. History will not judge such strategies by their intentions, but by the order they leave behind.
My Take
What troubles me most in the current moment is not the brazenness of power, but the intellectual ease with which power now explains itself. Strategy has begun to speak in the language of inevitability, as though coercion were a law of nature rather than a choice made by states that still claim fidelity to law. When the killing of a political leader is framed as an instrument of stability, and when energy routes are reconceived as levers of obedience rather than arteries of collective survival, we are no longer dealing with strategy alone; we are confronting a moral abdication dressed as realism.
The organizing premise that now circulates with increasing confidence is that the international system has condensed into a singular rivalry, with China cast as the only adversary of consequence. Everything else—regional conflicts, sanctions regimes, maritime deployments—is treated as subsidiary to this central contest. This framing is seductive in its simplicity, but it is also dangerously reductive. It mistakes prominence for exclusivity and competition for totality. In doing so, it erases the plural vulnerabilities that actually define our era: climate fragility, technological asymmetry, normative decay, and the quiet exhaustion of multilateral trust.
What follows from this reduction is a strategic posture that views law not as a framework for restraint, but as an obstacle to be managed. The prohibition on the use of force becomes a technicality; sovereignty becomes conditional; civilian suffering becomes collateral abstraction. The argument is rarely made explicitly, but it is present in the architecture of decisions: that legality must bend when it interferes with geopolitical necessity. This is not a new temptation, but it is one that history has punished with unfailing regularity.
The elimination of political leadership, when justified as pre-emptive or deterrent, represents a particularly stark rupture with legal principle. Leadership, however odious or inconvenient, is not a lawful target outside the narrow confines of armed conflict. To suggest otherwise is to collapse the distinction between war and governance, between battlefield and polity. Once that line dissolves, no office, no election, no succession is secure. The immunity of political authority is not a courtesy; it is a stabilizing norm. Its erosion does not produce order; it produces fear masquerading as control.
Equally troubling is the quiet normalization of economic strangulation as a strategic virtue. Energy, food, and finance are no longer treated as shared dependencies but as instruments of compliance. The moral difficulty here is not merely that such measures harm civilians—though they invariably do—but that they obscure responsibility. Suffering is diffused across markets, currencies, and supply chains, allowing decision-makers to deny causation while claiming effectiveness. Law, by contrast, insists on attribution. It demands that power acknowledge consequence. That insistence is precisely what makes law inconvenient to those who prefer leverage without accountability.
The obsession with chokepoints illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. The Strait of Hormuz is invoked not as a shared passage governed by transit rights, but as a valve to be tightened or loosened in response to strategic mood. Yet international straits are not bargaining chips; they are legal constructs sustained by mutual restraint. To weaponize them, even indirectly, is to convert a commons into a pressure chamber. Such tactics may produce short-term advantage, but they do so by hollowing out the very rules that make maritime order possible.
It is often said that rivals do not respect law, and that unilateral restraint is therefore naïve. This argument confuses prudence with surrender. Law does not require passivity; it requires justification. Self-defence is not abolished by legal order; it is disciplined by it. What realism increasingly demands, however, is not discipline but exemption. It asks that power be trusted to regulate itself, even as it dismantles the norms that once constrained it. This is not realism; it is faith in force.
The rhetorical style associated with President Donald Trump made this faith explicit. Transactions replaced treaties, unpredictability replaced assurance, and disruption was elevated to a strategy in its own right. Yet the deeper issue is not rhetorical temperament but structural impatience. The belief that norms slow action, that institutions dilute resolve, and that law is an encumbrance rather than a safeguard reflects a misunderstanding of how power endures. Power that relies solely on coercion must constantly escalate; power that is embedded in legitimacy can afford restraint.
There is also a strategic miscalculation embedded in the energy-centric approach to rivalry. To assume that constricting access to oil can decisively subordinate a major economy is to ignore adaptation. States subjected to pressure rarely capitulate; they diversify, innovate, and insulate. Coercion accelerates autonomy. It invites alternatives. In seeking to dominate the present, such strategies often surrender the future.
From a legal-philosophical standpoint, the most corrosive effect of great-power realism is its erosion of responsibility. Decisions are justified by reference to abstraction—security, stability, balance—while the human costs are rendered invisible. Law insists on visibility. It insists that harm be named, that justification be articulated, and that restraint be principled rather than tactical. This insistence is not weakness; it is moral seriousness.
The world has seen what happens when power declares itself exceptional. The vocabulary may change, the technology may advance, but the pattern remains: escalation, fragmentation, and eventual reckoning. International law emerged not from idealism, but from exhaustion—from the recognition that unrestrained rivalry consumes not only its targets but its architects.
If China is indeed a rival, then it must be engaged as one within a framework that preserves the possibility of coexistence. Rivalry need not entail annihilation, nor competition collapse into coercion. Law does not deny conflict; it structures it. To abandon that structure in pursuit of advantage is to confuse movement with progress.
What is ultimately at stake is not dominance, but direction. A world in which leaders are eliminated, energy is weaponized, and commons are privatized by force is not a world ordered by strength; it is a world ordered by anxiety. Stability built on fear is brittle. Order built on restraint endures.
The task before us is therefore not to outpace law, but to recommit to it—not as a slogan, but as a discipline. Power will always test the limits of legality. The measure of civilization lies in whether those limits are defended when they are most inconvenient.
