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It was revealing that one of the first tributes to Lindsey Graham, a US senator who died on Saturday aged ۷۱, came from Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, a far-right provocateur who recently caused widespread anger by sharing footage of himself taunting bound activists who had been trying to sail to Gaza with aid.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was not far behind, calling Graham a “great friend of Israel and a cherished friend of mine”, and he was quickly followed by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who described him as “a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer”.
With eulogies also flowing from Nato allies and Taiwan, it was evident that Graham, one of ۱۰۰ senators in Washington, had a global reach that few could match. He travelled the world to advocate for a muscular US foreign policy, frequently visited American troops stationed overseas and was vital in shaping Donald Trump’s worldview. But his legacy was complicated and often bloody.
“There’s no doubt Lindsey Graham was a central figure in Republican foreign policy circles and played a significant role in broader conversations about America’s place in the world,” says Brett Bruen, a former director of global engagement in Barack Obama’s White House. “He was certainly similar to his old pal John McCain and in many ways he inherited that mantle, albeit not with the same moral clarity that McCain seemed to hold on to despite the way that Trump had upended Republican politics.”
A former air force lawyer and member of the South Carolina air national guard, Graham was a leading neoconservative hawk whose political career came full circle in the Middle East over two decades. In ۲۰۰۳ he was a cheerleader for George W Bush’s war in Iraq. In ۲۰۲۶ he was a crucial influence on Trump’s war in Iran.
After a spell in the House of Representatives, Graham had only been in the Senate for a month when in ۲۰۰۳, Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, made a presentation to the United Nations security council arguing that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was secretly pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
Graham was vocally supportive, stating: “The Iraqi response of, ‘We have no weapons of mass destruction,’ is a flat-out lie. I hope the world will get behind President Bush in making sure this man cannot continue his weapons program. He either needs to be disarmed or replaced.”
Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and no weapons of mass destruction were found. Bush’s decision to go to war has been described by one influential thinktank as the worst foreign policy blunder in US history.
Undeterred, Graham argued that Iran was exploiting the Iraq conflict to strengthen its position across the Middle East. For years he promoted policies aimed at isolating Iran and limiting its missile and nuclear programmes. He opposed Obama’s nuclear deal and in ۲۰۱۵ called for pre-emptive military action that would leave Iran’s military “a shell of its former self”.
Those instincts often appeared incompatible with Trump’s “America first” rhetoric, which cast suspicion on overseas military adventures. Yet once Trump’s nomination for president became inevitable in ۲۰۱۶, Graham steadily transformed from fierce adversary to close ally, personal friend and golf partner. He became a frequent visitor to the White House and adviser to Trump on foreign affairs, especially Iran, Israel and Ukraine.
Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator for California, told NBC’s Meet the Press programme on Sunday: “Many of us considered him the Trump whisperer. If we wanted to know what the president’s thinking was or how he might be moved on something, you would go to Lindsey to discuss it.”
Graham applauded Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear sites last year. Along with Netanyahu, he was arguably one of the most persuasive voices in encouraging Trump to go to war in February despite the reported reservations of JD Vance and others.
Speaking to the Politico news site in March, Graham said he had spent months encouraging the president to view the overthrow of Iran’s leadership as a defining second-term achievement, comparing it to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And once the conflict had begun, he continued trying to influence it and made clear that he had no regrets.
Graham posted on social media last month: “To those who say Iran is stronger now than before, that is an insult to the American military and it is delusional thinking because the Iranian economy is in shambles.”
It was a stance that reassured more traditional Republican foreign policy hawks but caused unrest in the “Make America great again” movement, which had supported Trump in part because of his promise to keep the US out of “forever wars”, similar to the quagmire in Iraq.
Iranian state television announced Graham’s death during a live broadcast in openly hostile terms. “I congratulate the great nation of Iran on Lindsey Graham, the warmongering and anti-Iranian US senator, having gone to hell,” its anchor said.
Graham’s political ties to the Ronald Reagan-era Republican party were also manifest in his staunch support for Ukraine in its long and bitter war against Vladimir Putin. He had visited Ukraine – for the ۱۰th time since the war began – just before his death and announced an agreement on Friday with the Trump administration to move forward on a package of sanctions against Russia.
On Sunday Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president, called Graham “a personal friend. A supporter of @NATO and Ukraine. A Transatlanticist. A friend of Finland.” The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said he was “a true friend and partner of Germany in the transatlantic alliance. We stood side by side for more than four decades.”
Yet Graham remained loyal to the point of sycophancy toward Trump, who has praised Putin as a “strong leader” and “very smart” and who memorably berated Zelenskyy in their first Oval Office meeting last year. The senator’s sudden death could remove a check on Trump’s impulses and cut off access for foreign leaders who had come to depend on him as an interlocutor.
Bruen, who is now the president of the public affairs agency Global Situation Room, said: “In recent years he seemed to exert outsized influence on Donald Trump, mostly in trying to pull him back from his flirtatious and somewhat misguided relations with dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. It does make you wonder whether or not his departure will remove some of the guardrails in some of the last-minute interventions that seemed to prevent us from doing bad deals with the Kremlin.”
Graham’s unyielding support of Israel and his hawkish approach drew anger elsewhere in the Middle East. He was outspoken in supporting Israel’s devastating war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip after the ۷ October ۲۰۲۳ attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants.
In May ۲۰۲۴, after Washington paused some military aid to Israel, he urged the then defence secretary Lloyd Austin to “give Israel what they need to fight the war”. He likened the threat Israel faced to “Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids”. He posted on X later that year that “the Palestinians in Gaza are the most radicalized population on the planet who are taught to hate Jews from birth”.
In April, Graham was among guests at a British embassy garden party in Washington attended by King Charles and Queen Camilla. Approached by the Guardian, he proved cordial and talkative and mentioned that he had spoken to Trump earlier that day. Evidently unburdened by doubts about the US interventions in Venezuela and Iran, he also cheerfully made a prediction: Cuba would be next.
