Should the U.S. be in business of assassinating foreign leaders?
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
It’s not the first time the United States has been involved in the killing of a foreign leader, but it’s something U.S. leaders and the American public have long wrestled with.
NPR’s Ryan Lucas reports.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the opening strike of their war on Iran, the U.S. and Israel killed the Islamic Republic's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini. |
| 0:07.5 | Iranian state media is telling the people of Iran that the Ayatollah has been killed. |
| 0:13.3 | This is not the first time the U.S. has targeted a foreign leader. |
| 0:16.8 | It helps set the stage for the 1961 assassination of the Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo. |
| 0:23.2 | As dictator Rafael Trujillo is shot down by seven assassins. |
| 0:27.0 | The CIA also plotted to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, among others in this era. |
| 0:33.4 | More recently, in 2020, President Trump announced a successful drone strike against a high-ranking Iranian official Kassam Soleimani, whom the U.S. government considered a terrorist. |
| 0:44.8 | Last night of my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless, precision strike that killed the number one terrorist anywhere in the world. |
| 0:56.0 | Consider this. It is exceedingly rare for a democracy to kill a foreign head of state. |
| 1:02.5 | So the killing of Ayatollah Khomeini raises the question, not for the first time in U.S. history, |
| 1:08.2 | should the United States be in the business of assassinating foreign |
| 1:11.9 | leaders? Some experts say just because a country can doesn't mean it should. |
| 1:21.4 | From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. |
| 1:26.9 | Music Lisa Chang. |
| 1:33.7 | It's consider this from NPR. |
| 1:38.9 | The question of whether or not the U.S. should be involved in the assassinations of foreign leaders has been thrown into sharp relief by the U.S. and Israel's strike that killed Iran's Ayatola. |
| 1:45.3 | NPR's Ryan Lucas examined the U.S.'s shifting relationship with the idea of killing foreign |
| 1:50.3 | heads of state. It's rare for democracies to do so, but it's something that U.S. leaders and the |
| 1:56.6 | American public have long wrestled with. Here's his report. In the first few decades of the Cold War, |
| 2:01.9 | the United States wanted to keep all options on the table, including assassinations and its |
| 2:06.8 | global struggle against the Soviet Union. Luca Trenta is a professor at Swansea University in the |
| 2:11.8 | UK and the author of a book on assassinations in U.S. foreign policy. There was certainly a sense that assassination was just another contingency, something that the |
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