Assassinations That Changed The World

by Nigel Cawthorne

ISBN: 9781913543860

Published: 2020-10

We live in an age of asymmetric warfare. Huge armies no longer face each other on the battlefield. Instead heads of major powers and lone assassins (or martyrs) target each other to pursue their agendas. President Donald Trump felt it necessary to use drones to blow away the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Qasem Soleimani -- a mastermind of terrorism in the Middle East who threatened the lives of US troops -- and President Barack Obama felt fully justified in sending in US Navy SEALs to take out Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. This is the nature of modern warfare. And it is only going to get worse. When nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, in 1914, he triggered the First World War. Few assassinations have had such devastating consequences, but political assassinations have always changed the world -- often in ways that the assassins and their cohorts could not have predicted. The murder of John F. Kennedy left Lyndon B....