In international politics, it is often assumed that wars end when the fighting becomes unbearable and the parties turn to diplomacy.
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parties → assume → diplomacy
But diplomacy requires interlocutors — figures with the standing to negotiate and the authority to deliver.
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diplomacy → require → standing
Remove them, and a war loses not only its potential mediators but the very possibility of a settlement.
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war → remove → settlement
This is worth keeping in mind after a striking recent assessment.
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This → keep → assessment
In early September 2026, Sir John Sawers, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, told The Financial Times that Israel had deliberately killed Ali Larijani.
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Israel → tell → Larijani
In his reading, Larijani was targeted not because he ran Iran’s war effort, but because he was among the few Iranian figures capable of reaching a deal both sides could accept.
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sides → target → deal
Coming from a career intelligence officer rather than an advocate, the judgement invites a larger question: does the killing of Larijani belong to a pattern in which Israel removes, at moments of possible negotiation, the very people through whom a war might have been ended?
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war → come → whom
A pattern, not an incident
Consider what such killings actually produce.
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killings → consider → what
Assassinating the head of a government or an army opens a vacuum that others rush to fill.
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others → assassinate → that
Assassinating a designated negotiator opens a narrower and more damaging one: a vacuum of moderation.
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Assassinating → assassinate → moderation
The successor to a killed negotiator is rarely more flexible than the person removed.
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successor → kill → person
More often, he is harder, because the hardliners are the ones who survive and inherit.
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who → survive → ?
The channel loses its author, and the hardening that follows is then read, on both sides, as proof that diplomacy was never possible in the first place.
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diplomacy → lose → place
The tactic becomes self-fulfilling: it does not merely interrupt a negotiation; it manufactures the evidence that negotiation was futile.
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negotiation → become → evidence
In September 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator for Palestine, was assassinated in Jerusalem by members of Lehi, the Zionist underground whose leaders included the future Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir.
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leaders → assassinate → minister
Bernadotte had been shuttling between the parties with truce and partition proposals.
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Bernadotte → shuttle → proposals
His killers regarded any compromise as betrayal.
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killers → regard → betrayal
The same logic reappeared in November 2020, when Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the leading figure in Iran’s nuclear programme, was killed near Tehran in an operation widely attributed to Israel.
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Fakhrizadeh → reappear → Israel
The timing — weeks after Joe Biden was elected president of the United States, having committed to reviving the 2015 nuclear agreement — led many to read it less as counterproliferation than as an obstacle deliberately placed in the path of diplomacy.
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Biden → elect → diplomacy
Larijani’s killing in March 2026 fits the same template.
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killing → fit → template
He had been Iran’s nuclear negotiator two decades earlier and had defended the 2015 deal as speaker of parliament.
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He → defend → parliament
After the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the war’s opening day, he had become the country’s effective decision-maker.
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he → become → day
Western diplomats who dealt with him described him as tough but pragmatic — precisely the kind of counterpart with whom an American off-ramp might have been negotiated.
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ramp → deal → whom
This is not a method confined to states.
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This → confine → states
Israel applies the same logic to the non-state actors it fights, and the results reveal both the strategy and its ambiguities.
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results → apply → strategy
In February 1992, Israel killed Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Abbas al-Musawi.
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Israel → kill → general
His successor was Hassan Nasrallah, who, over three decades, built the movement into the most capable non-state armed force in the region — a vacuum filled by a far harder man.
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who → build → man
In July 2024, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau and its lead negotiator in the Gaza ceasefire talks, while that diplomacy was still under way; authority passed to Yahya Sinwar, and the negotiating track never recovered.
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track → assassinate → Sinwar
Weeks later, Israel killed Nasrallah himself.
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Israel → kill → Nasrallah
In each case, the target was the point of coordination — the figure through whom the adversary organised and, at times, negotiated.
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adversary → organise → times
Removing him produced the same short-term disarray and, at least twice, a successor even less inclined to a deal.
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Removing → remove → deal
Seen through Israel’s own strategic lens, this is coherent rather than merely vindictive.
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this → see → lens
For a state that regards Iran’s system as an existential threat, the preferred outcome is that system’s collapse, not a negotiated accommodation with it.
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outcome → regard → it
A durable deal brokered by a credible pragmatist would stabilise the very order Israel wants to see fall, and it would foreclose the American military pressure on which the hope of collapse depends.
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hope → broker → collapse
External pressure has tended to harden the very indecision it claims to break, widening the split between a political leadership that acknowledges the war’s costs and a security establishment that treats every strike as vindication of defiance.
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that → tend → defiance
Removing the pragmatists tilts that balance further towards the second camp — and towards the conclusion that there is nothing left to negotiate.
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Removing → remove → conclusion
Israel’s stated rationale, in each case, has been military and preventive: the decapitation of a hostile leadership.
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rationale → state → leadership
Larijani was no dove — he helped run a war effort and presided over harsh repression at home.
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he → help → home
Haniyeh led a movement responsible for the October 2023 attack.
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Haniyeh → lead → attack
The intent to foreclose diplomacy is inferred, not proven, and the returns are uncertain: as the al-Musawi killing showed, removing a leader can produce a stronger and more implacable successor rather than a pliable one.
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removing → foreclose → one
…and 7 more, not listed.
The Aporia
