Assassination and the Making of the Modern World

“The world has been aghast — horrified once more by the monster.”

- Seán Lester, 1938

When a sniper’s bullet screamed past the head of former President Donald J. Trump in July 2024, the United States found itself mere centimeters away from possible catastrophe. Trump became the first American president wounded in an assassination attempt since Ronald Reagan and narrowly avoided a fate that had befallen heads of state from Sweden to India. Trump, of course, is far from the only American politician to suffer a recent near-death experience. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who mercifully was away from home at the time), House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords all survived serious threats to their lives from attackers over the last two decades.

In 2025, America’s luck ran out, as two high-profile assassinations—of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman (and her husband) and political commentator Charlie Kirk—deeply shook the nation. The latter incident, in particular, ignited a political firestorm in the country, with the second Trump administration initiating a counterterrorism campaign against unspecified far-left forces purportedly driven by antifascist ideologies. The assassination fever continued when a gunman attempted to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., in April, seeking to kill Trump and senior Republican officials, before he was stopped at the security perimeter.

Yet these recent assassination attempts, some successful, should not have taken us by surprise. In “Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination,” Simon Ball issues a simple and ominous warning: assassinations are not historical aberrations, but in fact a ubiquitous and tragic thorn in the modern world’s side. Ball, a historian at the University of Leeds, is the author of several prior books, most of which focus on the history of war and conflict. In his own telling, this new study emerged from “curiosity-driven research” into the history of firearms control. Ball reaches two key conclusions: First, assassination has long served as a political instrument by both state and non-state actors. Second, the success or failure of attempted assassinations often turns as much on the target state’s response as on the attacker’s skill.

Ball organizes his account both chronologically and geographically, allowing him to spotlight specific waves of assassination around the world over a little more than the last 100 years. Some chapters, for instance, cover anticolonial struggles against British rule over several decades while others examine how totalitarian leaders in the Soviet Union and Germany both feared and employed assassination during the lead-up to World War II. By the time the reader reaches America’s global counterterrorism assassination campaign in later chapters, a clear pattern has emerged: Assassination has helped construct modern political regimes from China to the United Kingdom.

A Long and Bloody History of Assassination

Ball’s narrative begins in 1914, which he terms “the starting point for a new age of assassination,” delivering “the most important assassination of them all,” on a June morning in Sarajevo. In most cases, Ball finds the world’s assassins have failed to drive great social or political change, or have emerged disappointed with the long-term outcomes of their attack. Gavrilo Princip—who killed Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand that day and catalyzed the chain reaction that led to the outbreak of the First World War—certainly bit off more than he intended to chew, having merely aimed for greater Yugoslav autonomy from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Ball argues that there are four elements to every assassination: the procurer, the assassin, his weapon, and the cover-up. Crucially, it was the Austro-Hungarian government’s efforts to root out the procurer of Ferdinand’s killing that propelled the world into war. Assassinations to that point had largely failed to change the world because targeted countries had reacted with calm. But “the response to the Sarajevo assassination was not calm.” The court in Vienna instead embarked on an extensive campaign to tie the assassins to the Serbian state in an effort to justify war. Ball puts it succinctly: “they had no proof that the Serbs had assassinated Franz Ferdinand, merely the fact that their whole foreign policy pointed to such a conclusion.”.

Assassinations over the following decades repeatedly challenged powerful states’ portrayals of themselves as secure, powerful, and resilient. While assassination against state leaders are best-known, Ball’s work makes clear that mid-level functionaries were often the most vulnerable. The story of anti-colonial resistance was rife with attempts on the lives of Western colonial officials asked to perform their jobs with little protection. Ball somewhat snarkily remarks that “the core signifier of the elite was protection provided by the state.”

Parsing the details of the long struggle with assassination in the modern world, “Death to Order” is packed with delicious historical tidbits. For instance, Ball meticulously describes how early protection details were constructed around vulnerable politicians. In this piece of historical reconstruction, one can see the early origins of the grand American presidential motorcade, which now frequently roars down Washington D.C.’s broad streets. Ball regales the reader with tales of old assassination societies in the Far East with delightfully quaint names—the Cherry Blossom Society, the Plum Blossom Society, and Jessfield Road—while dwelling on a scarcely believable umbrella gun that claimed the life of Georgi Markov in London. Ball’s research is very wide-ranging, boasting almost 80 pages of detailed footnotes, most of which direct readers to primary sources.

If the narrative occasionally gets bogged down in quickly forgotten details, and the citations might have benefitted from more references to other secondary works, those are minor quibbles.

State Assassinations and Counter-Assassination

The world’s most infamous assassinations were largely perpetrated by terrorist groups and non-state actors, employing violence to punch above their weight against governmental adversaries. But, according to Ball, assassination is not merely a tactic of the non-state terrorist, but a favored foreign policy tool of states, including the United States. To follow Ball’s chronology is to watch states increasingly take to heart Max Weber’s maxim that states’ stability depends on establishing a monopoly on legitimate violence in a territory. Assassination in the 21st century is a story of how states grow increasingly emboldened by—and even proud of—their own assassination campaigns.

“This fate will befall other traitors of Ukraine and puppets of Putin’s regime,” the Ukrainian military intelligence division, for instance, warned in late 2023 after killing a former Ukrainian Member of Parliament who had supported Russia’s invasion. A similar pride has accompanied the United States and Israel’s campaign of leadership decapitation against Iran, not least during the 2026 war, with President Trump telling ABC after Israel’s assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “I got him before he got me.”

State assassinations spotlight another of Ball’s quandaries: the search for the “honorable” assassin. Plots against Nazi German leaders such as Adolf Hitler (who survived) and SS official Reinhard Heydrich (who did not) may have been noble, but they led to the execution of the plotters and to broader violent crackdowns on their perceived harborers and civilian supporters.

Compellingly, Ball insists that the history of assassination cannot be told simply through murders, but must also assess the responses to the murders. He suggests that counter-assassination strategies worked best when they “limit the extent of conspiracy,” not exaggerate it. In line with much counterterrorism and counterinsurgency doctrine, the book finds that indiscriminate crackdowns, whether violent or not, serve only to exacerbate grievances and make further killing more likely. Ball heaps particular praise on restrained British responses pioneered in India under Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, calling it a “liberal script.”

Ominously, there are direct parallels between Austria-Hungary’s reaction in 1914 and the Trump administration’s actions since Kirk’s killing. Much the same dynamic—much the same eagerness to use the assassination to pursue pre-determined political enemies—is at play in Washington today. Indeed, had Ball finished his book in 2026, he might have cautioned us that the administration’s actions against anti-fascist crowds are likely not just politically motivated but counterproductive, further fanning the flames of violence. Democrats and Republicans alike, Ball would likely argue, will be best served to dial down the temperature by emphasizing the limits of an assassination plot, not its grandiosity.

Recognizing that assassination attempts are often carried out by lone madmen, Ball contends, should help relegate assassinations to where they historically belong: as irritations, not existential threats to democracy. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly given nearly 300 pages of death and destruction, Ball’s book is fundamentally optimistic. “The nearer one gets to the present,” Ball writes, “the harder it becomes to identify assassinations of enduring importance.”

The Next Generation of Assassinations

The most alarming predictions after Kirk’s tragic demise—“This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” the prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones declared—have mercifully not (yet) come to fruition. But the Kirk assassination nevertheless has immediately been incorporated into far-right mythology, playing “a central role in the totalitarian theatre of paranoid victimhood.” In the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, Trump and his officials and allies have repeatedly played up a mortal threat against them, perhaps conditioning their listeners to respond with some unspoken action of their own. “Either we fight back or they will kill us,” Elon Musk tweeted to his over 200 million X followers three days after Kirk’s death. Musk’s “they” is undefined, perhaps offering room to widen the conspiracy later, should it prove politically expedient.

But the American assassinations that defined 2025 were not perpetrated by members of broader conspiracies, nor did they advocate for political parties or platforms. Margaret Talbot put it elegantly: “We’re left examining ghostly traces of ideas that won’t coalesce into an ideology. […] In the absence of a conspiracy, we make one up.” Yet partisan motive is not necessarily a precursor for political assassination. According to the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, 2025 set records for threats of violence against U.S. public officials. This trend is likely to escalate further in 2026, and politicians and other public figures will be forced to reckon with their own mortality as they pursue their careers. “‘[H]igh-risk missions’ must always operate on the assumption of imminent attack,” Ball writes in the context of the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens at Benghazi in 2012—a warning one wishes one could have given to Charlie Kirk on the morning of his murder. A similar calculation must now be made by America’s political rank and file, who must assume that an assassination attempt may be imminent: that a firearm or explosive device may lurk somewhere in the adoring crowd.