Lindsey Graham’s last act as a senator was a visit to Ukraine, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
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He was one Ukraine’s biggest champions among Republicans in the Senate, believing the U.S. should support the country against Russia’s aggression.
One of Graham’s last legislative actions was to lobby for a bill, alongside Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, that would impose huge tariffs on countries buying oil and gas from Russia, trying to block off one of the remaining avenues for Russia to fund its war with Ukraine.
Graham supported President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran to stop the terror-sponsoring nation from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Like most hawks, he defended Israel as the lone democracy in the Middle East. He was close friends with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who publicly mourned his passing.
With Graham’s death comes the continued attrition — through deaths and retirements — of Republican hawks, those who believe in a muscular foreign policy, including, when necessary, through military intervention.
The trio of Graham and the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democratic-turned-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut — all now passed away — reshaped U.S. foreign policy in the 2000s under the belief that the United States must assert itself as the lone superpower in order to maintain an uneasy peace in the world.
When the U.S. steps back from this role, it is inevitably pulled back in, hawks argue. Like after the 1990s, when Clinton was wary of foreign entanglements in a post-Cold War world. But the U.S. was reawakened to global threats on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked New York and Washington, D.C., killing thousands of Americans.
Or in 2015, when, after President Barack Obama tried to “reset” the U.S.’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea.
And again in 2022, during the Biden administration, when Russia again invaded Ukraine, starting a protracted war between the two countries.
The longterm military campaigns in Afghanistan, which had almost universal support after 9/11, and in Iraq, which had less support, led to the recent weariness Americans feel when their leaders propose intervention.
Anti-interventionists in the Republican Party, those who support the “America First” movement, long criticized Graham for his hawkishness, turning “neocon” into a pejorative.
Now, without Graham, is there a Republican senator who will take up that mantle? Especially amid a new, increasingly unpopular war against Iran.
In August 2024, Graham called for a firmer hand against Iran in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
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“When President Trump left office, Iran was exporting 300,000 barrels of oil a day,” he wrote. “By October 2023, that figure was up to 1.4 million barrels a day. That generates money to fund Iran’s top export: terrorism.”
Graham wanted to make it more difficult for other countries to buy Iranian oil, and he wanted a “red line” on Iran’s nuclear program.
“The ayatollahs continue to deny it, but when they chant ‘death to Israel’ and ‘death to America,’ they mean it—and we should take them seriously,” he said.
Toward the end of President Joe Biden’s four years in office, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Iran was one to two weeks away from having enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon. Iran was also developing a missile program with the capability of firing a weapon far into Europe.
“It is hard to imagine a worse disaster for the world than if the ayatollahs acquire nuclear capability,” he said. “It would throw the Middle East into a nuclear arms race and put us all on the road to Armageddon.”
Is Trump a dove or a hawk?
Trump, with his “Peace through Strength,” foreign policy agenda, is far more interventionist than his America First supporters would like. Vice President JD Vance is the hero of those more populist Republicans, while hawkish Republicans typically back Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Rubio, and Graham before his death, appear to be in a dwindling minority. Instead, the ascendant position in conservative circles is that it isn’t America’s job to police the world. Instead, we should protect our own.
No matter how powerful the United States is, or how big its economy, it cannot block itself from an anarchic world. When Hugo Chavez dismantled Venezuelan democracy and destroyed its economy, that problem ended up coming to American shores.
If Iran developed a nuclear weapon, it would destabilize the entire Middle East and the global oil market. And it isn’t hard to imagine the current regime using a nuclear weapon in a conflict.
Graham believed in American strength, and its ability to be a force for good around the world. In a piece about the need to spend more on the Navy, Graham wrote: “There is no doubt that the costs of these investments are great and will require tradeoffs and significant political capital, but the costs of inaction will be far greater. History demonstrates that adversaries are emboldened by America’s hesitation and deterred by its resolve.”
Perhaps a successor to Graham will emerge among Republican senators. It’s hard to imagine he or she will possess his same wit or unique biography, but others with his skills seemed irreplaceable before.
In most foreign entanglements, including in Iran, the answer of intervention versus protectionism isn’t black and white. We need both doves and hawks to debate and argue over American foreign policy decisions.
But we need hawks like Graham to remind us that we ignore the world at our own peril.
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