There are moments in history when evil stops being an abstraction and acquires a face, a pulse, a fixed address. Most of the time the malice that drives a war is genuinely distributed — across institutions, ideologies, bureaucracies, the cold inertia of millions of people doing their small assigned part. You cannot point at it. You cannot, in any literal sense, end it. But occasionally the architecture of a regime tightens around one man so completely that the distinction between the man and the machine collapses. When that happens, a question arises that polite society prefers not to ask aloud: if the war flows from a single living person, is killing that person a legitimate way to stop the war? I want to take that question seriously, because I think the honest answer is yes — and because the reasons we treat one such man as a candidate and another as untouchable have nothing to do with morality and everything to do with fear.
Today there are two men in whom global evil has, to a remarkable degree, become personified: the ruler in the Kremlin and the Supreme Leader in Tehran. They are very different figures presiding over very different countries, but they share the crucial structural feature. Each is not merely the head of a regime but its origin point. And in both cases, the conventional wisdom — that you must dismantle the system patiently, that the individual is just a symptom, that decapitation changes nothing — turns out, on inspection, to be wrong.
When the system is the man
Consider Iran. The comfortable Western framing holds that the real power lies in the Revolutionary Guard, in the generals and the nuclear scientists, while the aging cleric at the top is a kind of ceremonial relic, mumbling verses while the machine grinds on without him. This is precisely backwards. Under the country’s own constitution, the Supreme Leader determines all domestic and foreign policy. He is head of state and commander-in-chief. He issues final decisions across government, economy, and diplomacy; he controls the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, the armed forces, and the media. Senior officials are vetted, directly or indirectly, by a council he appoints. Over his decades in power he transformed an already authoritarian theocracy into something with even greater concentration of authority at the very top.
The decisive point concerns the Guard itself. The standard objection — that the evil resides in the institution rather than the man — falls apart once you remember the institution’s history. It was the current Supreme Leader who, after taking it over, built the Revolutionary Guard into what it is now: he turned it from a loose volunteer association of regime loyalists into a vast state within a state, with an enormous budget and its tentacles in every sector of national life. He is not simply the Guard’s commander. He is its creator in its present form. So to say the evil is concentrated in the Guard is, in the end, only another way of saying it is concentrated in him. Everyone below him is executing his will.
This is why the strategy of “decapitation and blinding” — killing the intelligence chiefs, the generals, the scientists — is logically incomplete if it spares the one man at the center. What is the point of eliminating the operatives while leaving intact the person who, by constitutional design, determines everything the operatives do? You have removed the hands and left the brain. The same calls for the destruction of a neighboring state, the same patronage of proxy terror, the same march toward a nuclear weapon — all of it issues from a single source. Remove every executor and preserve the source, and you have accomplished a great deal of killing and very little of consequence.
The objection people reach for next is the one liberals always reach for: don’t touch him, because what follows might be worse. Perhaps his removal would consolidate the hardliners rather than weaken them; perhaps it would create a martyr; perhaps the uncertainty afterward would be more dangerous than the cruel-but-rational figure we know. I find this argument unpersuasive in exactly the way I find it unpersuasive when applied to the Kremlin. “Better the evil you understand than the chaos you don’t” is a counsel of paralysis dressed up as prudence. It is a shaky hypothesis built on nothing but fear of the unknown, and it would, taken seriously, forbid us from ever removing any tyrant at all. Eliminating the principal living source of an evil is a rational step, not a reckless one.
The same logic, the Kremlin edition
Everything I have said about Tehran applies, point for point, to Moscow. Russia is a personalist regime in the fullest sense — a structure of absolute, undivided power inherited in its deep grammar from the Horde, in which the population has no agency and everything genuinely hinges on one man. The war against Ukraine is his war. It does not have the broad ideological ownership of society that would let it outlive him; it is sustained by his will and the apparatus of fear he commands. Which means the physical elimination of that man would, in fact, be a correct way to end the war — not a fantasy, not a war crime, but a legitimate solution to the precise problem of a conflict that cannot end while its sole author remains in charge.
I am aware of how this sounds, and I want to be careful, because there is an enormous difference between a principle and a public program. To say that removing this man would end the war is not to issue a call for assassination from a writer’s desk. These matters belong in the quiet rooms of states that have both the responsibility and the means; they should not be turned into a public debate, and I have no illusion that a writer’s opinion belongs anywhere near the operational question. The point is narrower and, I think, undeniable: when a regime is genuinely personalist, the man is not a symbol of the problem. He is the problem. And the tools for addressing that are surely discussed in more than one situation room already.
So if the logic is the same in both cases, why is the Iranian cleric openly named as a target while the Russian president is treated as untouchable, the very mention of it taboo? Here we arrive at the heart of the matter, and the answer is bracingly simple. It is not a difference of principle. It is a difference of deterrent.
The deterrent, not the principle
Why was a certain terrorist mastermind hunted down and killed in his hideout, while no comparable operation is even whispered about regarding the Kremlin? The honest answer is that the terrorist did not have a country behind him armed with the second most lethal nuclear arsenal on Earth, and the Russian president does. That is the whole of it. The same distinction separates Tehran from Moscow today. People object that Iran, too, is a nuclear aspirant — but aspiration is not possession, and even a handful of crude devices is not a strategic deterrent. Here size matters, and so does delivery. Russia has a functioning nuclear triad: submarines that sail, bombers that fly, intercontinental missiles that are regularly tested — not with live warheads, but the delivery systems themselves are exercised, and they appear to work. All the talk that the triad is rotten and decayed changes nothing, because no one is willing to be the one to find out. Iran has nothing remotely comparable. That, and only that, is why one dictator is afraid and the other can be openly threatened.
And there is a second, even more fundamental, variable: political will. A correct solution is worthless without an actor who possesses both the desire and the capacity to carry it out. Against the Kremlin, no such unified actor exists. There are surely individuals who wish it, and discussions surely happen, but between those discussions and an actual political decision there remains an immense gap. Against the cleric in Tehran, the will plainly exists — because for the leadership and the citizens of Israel it is not an abstraction but an existential arithmetic. They understand, with total clarity, that only one outcome can survive on this planet: either the Supreme Leader who has spent years calling, in his own words and with specific timelines, for their annihilation, or the millions of people he proposes to annihilate. When the choice is framed that starkly — him or ten million of you — the will is not in doubt. It is the rare case where the desire and the capacity exist in the same hands at the same time. The missing ingredient against the Kremlin is exactly this, and it cannot be summoned by argument.
There is even a humane off-ramp that the structure of the present world quietly provides. The cleric need not necessarily be killed; exile would do as well. If he fled rather than fought, the strategic problem would be largely solved without the act of elimination at all. And there is, conveniently, somewhere for such men to go. Russia is already sheltering the deposed strongman of one neighboring country and the fallen tyrant of another. It is a big place. There is room for one more. The point is not flippant: the goal is to end the threat, and a dictator hiding abroad is a dictator who no longer governs.
The studios are targets too
One more implication follows, and it deserves to be stated plainly, because squeamishness about it is itself a kind of complicity. A war of this nature is not waged only with missiles and armor. It is waged with manufactured consent — with the daily output of the state television studios where well-paid performers transmute mass murder into entertainment, where the bombing of cities is narrated as triumph and the dehumanization of the enemy is rehearsed for an audience of millions. When the Israeli air force struck the headquarters of Iranian state television, it was not an excess; it was a recognition of what those buildings are. Propaganda that sustains a war of extermination is part of the war machine. The studios in Moscow from which the regime’s loudest voices broadcast their incitement are, by exactly the same standard, legitimate military targets. There is nothing morally exotic in saying so. The people who script the killing are not bystanders to it.
I am aware that all of this cuts against a deep and decent instinct — the instinct that says killing is the problem, never the solution, and that to name a man as a target is to descend to the level of the men we oppose. I respect that instinct; I do not share its conclusion. There is a difference between a gun in the hand of a criminal and a gun in the hand of someone defending the innocent from him. The state that has spent its entire existence being attacked and has never once sought to annihilate a people is not the moral equal of the regime that openly proclaims annihilation as policy. To pretend otherwise — to flatten the distinction between the arsonist and the firefighter in the name of a tidy pacifism — is not moral seriousness. It is moral confusion.
So the conclusion is uncomfortable but clear. There are moments when evil concentrates in one body, and we are living through two of them at once. In such moments, eliminating the man can be a correct and rational way to end a war, because the man genuinely is the war. Whether it is done depends not on whether it is right but on whether someone has both the will and the room to do it — and that, in turn, depends almost entirely on what the man stands behind. One of these dictators sits behind a working nuclear triad, and so the world has decided he is untouchable and his name unsayable in this context. The other does not, and so the question can at last be asked out loud. The difference between them is not a difference of guilt. It is a difference of fear. We should at least be honest enough to admit that the line we have drawn was drawn by his weapons, not by our conscience.