Lindsey Graham’s hawkish ideology leaves a legacy of destruction |
The sudden death over the weekend of South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is predictably inspiring a slew of tributes to the four-term Republican senator. Donald Trump has already ordered flags be flown at half-staff until Saturday, and Republican politicians across the country are fondly recalling Graham. But so too are the Democrats. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois honored Graham, calling him “a fierce Republican partisan one day and a key bipartisan ally the next”. Senator Adam Schiff of California lauded Graham’s “sense of humor and how he deployed it to move his policy positions forward”.
Through this thick, bipartisan forest of remembrances, however, lies Graham’s concrete legacy. Death has a way of extinguishing uncomfortable truths, but it’s important that we don’t forget who Graham was, what he exactly stood for, and what damage he has done over his political career.
Nowhere has Graham’s legacy been more consequential than in his constant push for a hawkish US foreign policy and his uncritical devotion to Israel at every turn. The Wall Street Journal described Graham as someone having “outsize influence on U.S. foreign policy”. And Aipac, the US’s pro-Israel lobby (as the Pac describes itself on Twitter/X), posted an encomium to Graham, called him “a great friend and true champion of the U.S.-Israel relationship”. (According to the non-partisan website Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics, Graham received more than $400,000 from Aipac, his largest donation by an organization, in 2025-2026 alone.)
Graham’s unceasing desire to project American power across the world didn’t begin with the second Trump administration. Before he was elected to the Senate, Graham, who was then a member of Congress, was already pushing for the US to go to war in Iraq. “We’re looking at going after Saddam Hussein,” Graham said in........