#foreign policy

Alright, I said I’d come back to this, and here I am, because the situation somehow got worse instead of better, and I think a lot of people have quietly stopped paying attention even though this thing is still very much happening. So let’s just walk through where we actually are right now, as of this week, without me pretending to be on Team Iran or Team USA, because I’m not on either team, I’m…

Greece’s bilateral defense contracts, on the one hand with Bulgaria and on the other with Montenegro, were ratified in the relevant parliamentary committee The plenary session of the Parliament ratified the bilateral defense contracts of Greece, on the one hand with Bulgaria “regarding the provision of support to the Greek Military Detachment, for the execution of aerial naval patrol missions”…

The war between the United States and Iran has returned not through a formal declaration, but through the language of ships, airstrikes, congressional notifications and the contested sovereignty of the Strait of Hormuz. Every night, American aircraft strike targets inside Iran. Every following round, Iran answers across the Gulf, targeting American-linked facilities, bases and maritime interests in the region, including in the Gulf and Jordan. Neither side appears eager for an unlimited war, yet both are now operating within the mechanics of one.

The immediate battlefield is Hormuz. The deeper confrontation is over the meaning of the 14-point memorandum of understanding signed on June 17. Washington wants to reduce that document to a temporary instrument that reopened oil flows and bought time. Tehran insists that paragraph 5 cannot be separated from the rest of the agreement. For Iran, the Strait is not a corridor to be reopened on American command. It is the remaining lever that obliges Washington to honour what it signed.

Donald Trump's objective is clear. He wants navigation in the Strait of Hormuz restored to the condition that existed before the war: ships crossing freely, no Iranian management, no tolls, no regional mechanism, no new authority and no political cost for Washington....

Iran's position is equally clear. It refers back to paragraph 5 of the MoU, which gave Tehran a defined role in arranging safe passage for commercial shipping for 60 days, with full implementation to follow once technical, military, and demining obstacles were addressed... This is the heart of the conflict. Trump wants Hormuz without Iran. Iran wants the MoU before Hormuz.

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

Lindsey Graham is dead. That news was a bit surprising, but it prompted many reviews of his record and revived an important question: Why’d he give it all up for a guy like Donald Trump? Graham served four terms in the Senate, chaired the Judiciary and Budget committees, and was one of the most prominent voices in American foreign policy for two decades. He died Saturday night at his Washington home, hours after returning from Kyiv.

Graham had shown no public signs of illness. A top staffer told NBC News there was no indication he had been feeling unwell. Graham was scheduled to appear on “Meet the Press” the following morning. Trump said he had spoken with Graham by phone that evening and described him as tired but otherwise fine. Graham’s relationship with Trump will define his legacy, and not in a positive way. Once upon a time, Graham had called Trump out publicly, warning that nominating him as president would destroy the party. But within a year, Graham discarded his principles, along with old friendships, to become one of Trump’s most reliable defenders. It was disquieting to witness.

What causes a person to abandon every stated principle, all for one rotten figure? Was it blackmail? Cowardice? I concur with those who say it was something more banal yet tragic. The last 11 years reveal a pattern quite common among fascist collaborators and hangers-on addicted to their proximity to power.

“Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

Graham ran for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and dropped out that December, never rising above the low single digits in the polls. But what his campaign lacked in traction, it made up for in memorable anti-Trump critiques. On CNN on Dec. 8, 2015, Graham called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who did not represent his party or “the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.” He added, “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” Friction between the two candidates ran deep at the time. Months earlier, after Trump read Graham’s personal cell phone number aloud (an early form of doxxing) at a campaign rally, Graham called Trump a “jackass” and destroyed his phone on camera. By January 2016, Graham said: “Donald Trump is the most unelectable Republican I’ve seen in my lifetime.” The following month, on Fox News, he went further. “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy.” On May 3, 2016, the day before Trump clinched the nomination, Graham wrote on Twitter: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.” He did not vote for Trump that November. The tweet remained live on his account for years afterward. Asked about it during a 2024 presidential debate broadcast, Graham claimed he simply hadn’t realized it was still there.

From kook to bestie

Graham’s pivot toward Trump began with a single fateful meeting. In March 2017, the newly inaugurated Trump invited Graham to the White House. By Graham’s own later account, a round of golf followed. By late 2017, Graham was telling CNN he was troubled by “this endless, endless attempt to label the guy some kind of kook not fit to be president.” Remember, in February of 2016, he had used that very word to describe Trump. He was now redirecting it against others. Asked what had changed his mind about the man he’d called unfit for office, Graham said: “I got to know him. I’ve played golf with him... He’s funny as hell. He’s got a great sense of humor. There’s a method to the madness.” By April 2018, with the leaders of North and South Korea pledging to work toward denuclearization, Graham said on Fox News that if it held, Trump “deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and then some.” Graham’s sycophancy even led him to betray those closest to him. Asked by Bloomberg that same year about Trump’s ongoing public attacks on the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Graham's closest friend in the Senate, including disparaging comments about McCain’s captivity as a prisoner of war, Graham said: “I don’t like what he says about John McCain. But when we play golf, it’s fun.”

“Count me out.”

For a brief moment, on Jan. 6, 2021, Graham appeared ready to do the right thing. Hours after a mob stormed the Capitol to disrupt certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win, Graham took to the Senate floor. While several Republican colleagues continued to object to the certification, Graham broke from them, saying: “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way… All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” He then affirmed Biden’s legitimate election. But five weeks later, on Feb. 13, at Trump’s second impeachment trial, Graham voted not to convict. The Senate voted 57-43 to convict, 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority required. About six weeks later, Graham traveled to Mar-a-Lago to golf with Trump, framing the trip as an attempt to broker peace between Trump and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. In a March 7, 2021 interview with Axios, Graham said: “Donald Trump was my friend before the riot. And I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot. I still consider him a friend.” From declaring “I’m out” to full reconciliation took him just two months.

[...]

The warmonger: Israel and Iran Graham was consistently one of the most hawkish members of the Senate, especially on Israel and Iran. His statements about the Middle East often seemed designed to shock and dehumanize. That record helps explain at least some of why the White House valued him beyond the golf course. After Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, Graham became one of the most forceful defenders of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, even if it meant slaughtering civilians. In a February 2026 podcast interview, asked about Israel “flattening Gaza,” Graham said: “Just flatten it. We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo. Were we wrong to drop an atomic bomb to end the Japanese reign of terror? In my view, if I were Israel, I would have probably done it the same way.”

[...] A Russia hawk until it wasn’t cool Graham’s position on Russia followed its own arc. For most of two decades, it looked nothing like his relationship with Trump. McCain, after meeting Vladimir Putin, once said: “I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, and I saw three letters, a ‘K,’ a ‘G,’ and a ‘B’” — a rebuke to George W. Bush’s 2001 comment that he’d looked in Putin’s eyes and gotten “a sense of his soul.” Graham, McCain’s closest ally on foreign policy, took a harder line than most.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Graham became one of the Senate’s most consistent voices for Ukrainian aid, eventually making ten wartime trips to Kyiv. Weeks into the invasion, he even called publicly for Putin’s assassination by his own citizens, invoking Julius Caesar’s killers and the German officer who tried to kill Hitler, telling reporters: “I just want him to go… I wish somebody had taken Hitler out in the ‘30s.”

A year later, when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin over the abduction of Ukrainian children, Graham’s office called it “more than justified by the evidence” and warned that “to forgive and forget Putin’s war crimes…would irrevocably damage the Rule of Law-based world order established at the end of World War II.” Graham’s anti-Russia stance, it turned out, was subject to presidential override. On Feb. 28, 2025, President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met in the Oval Office to sign an agreement giving the U.S. access to Ukrainian mineral resources. The meeting infamously devolved into a public confrontation, with Trump and Vice President JD Vance accusing Zelenskyy of insufficient gratitude for American support and Trump declaring that Zelenskyy had no cards. Trump ended the meeting before the deal could be signed or the planned joint press conference could begin.

The late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was an ardently anti-Trump person, then later turned into #1 Trump Fanboy.

What a sad way he will be remembered.

See Also:

Everything Is Horrible (Noah Berlatsky): Lindsey Graham: Opportunist or Fascist?

In a city full of bloodthirsty militarists, Graham distinguished himself as one of the worst.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the arch-warmonger from South Carolina, has died. He leaves behind a legacy of death, destruction, and massive human suffering. Graham cheered on every foreign war and every sanctions regime for at least the last thirty years, and he was among the loudest advocates for the criminal attack on Iran. He finally got that one last evil war that he wanted before the end. In a city full of bloodthirsty militarists, Graham distinguished himself as one of the worst. ...

The lives of others were always expendable for him, and he actively sought to put people in harm's way every chance he could. His callous indifference to the human costs of war caused him no political problems in Washington. On the contrary, his enthusiasm for bloodshed was what made him a fixture in the capital. ...

He did an abysmal job of representing the people of South Carolina for the last two decades, but once he was in office no one was ever able to dislodge him. In Washington, he enjoyed a wholly undeserved reputation as a serious figure on foreign policy. Graham was able to thrive in Washington because of a vile pro-war culture in which his rabid hawkishness was embraced.

Graham was initially a vocal critic of Trump because he feared that Trump's rise threatened the sort of reflexive interventionism that Graham prized. Once Trump was elected, Graham quickly learned that Trump was much closer to his positions than he assumed....

They say that the evil that men do live after them. That is certainly true of Graham, who supported wars that killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and destabilized entire regions for decades. He was just one hawkish senator among dozens, but he had an outsized impact on making U.S. foreign policy even more destructive and cruel than it would have been without him.