a remedy. It's just now that the US has quantum leaped the third world in technology to the point where they can easily pull off these killings with minimal exertion of force. The US has used covert operations for decades against enemy states and I would argue that the use of this decapitation strategy is far less insidious than getting the Army field manual and CIA playbook on psyops ran on the populace for 2+ decades.

Xi is safe because China can pose credible and material risk to the United States. No other country on earth can at this point, but that makes it somewhat possible for China to try to gather a consortium of its own client states. The guys who wrote the playbook didn't foresee the capital base that China has amassed and figured it would always be something like the USSR that we were bickering with.