Lindsey Graham’s hawkish ideology leaves a legacy of destruction | Moustafa Bayoumi

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 March 2002, “not to contain him, but to replace him.” The US did invade Iraq, but it happened a year later.

The multiple failures of the Iraq invasion, including the lie that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, didn’t stop Graham from supporting the war long after its true face became clear, or from counseling more war. In a speech to the Halifax International Security Forum in 2010, he promoted attacking Iraq’s neighbor, Iran, to “neuter” it, words that sound almost like Trump’s foreign policy today.

“Instead of a surgical strike on their nuclear infrastructure, I think we’re to the point now that you have to really neuter the [Iranian] regime’s ability to wage war against us and our allies,” he said. “And that’s a different military scenario. It’s not a ground invasion but it certainly destroys the ability of the regime to strike back.”

By 2015, he was sitting with his friends senator John McCain and former senator Joseph Lieberman, publicly denouncing Obama’s recently concluded Iran nuclear deal.

In 2017, Graham was a prime backer in the push to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, calling Jerusalem “the undeniable capital of Israel”. His support for Israel over the years has been so complete that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly considering flying to the United States to attend Graham’s funeral.

Graham’s support for limits on Palestinian sovereignty were constant throughout his career but became even more evident after the Hamas attacks of 2023 and Israel’s most recent, and most devastating, war on Gaza began. “Give Israel what they need to fight the war they can’t afford to lose,” he said at a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing. “This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.”

On another occasion, he was asked if Israel’s war in Gaza, which was “killing children, killing mothers, killing families who are not militants”, aligned with “Christian values”. Graham responded with “I don’t buy that at all,” adding that Israel ought to “flatten Gaza”.

When Norway’s $2tn sovereign wealth fund decided to divest from the US company Caterpillar over ethical concerns (Caterpillar’s machines are routinely used by Israel to enforce its occupation of Palestinian land), Graham responded by publicly threatening Norway with trade tariffs and visa travel restrictions on Norwegian fund executives.

Weeks earlier, he had issued another not-so-veiled threat against the well-known Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who had joined a humanitarian mission to deliver aid to Gaza by the sea. “Hope Greta and her friends can swim!” he posted on X.

He wanted the US to get directly involved militarily in Israel’s attacks in Lebanon. “I would like the United States to participate in military operations, in the aerial side, against Hezbollah, if that’s what it takes to knock them out,” he told the Times of Israel in 2025. “I want our fingerprints on that.”

Beyond the Middle East, he also lobbied fellow senators on the US attacking Colombia, as reported by Drop Site News. “We’re not going to sit on the sidelines and watch boats full of drugs come to our country,” he told CBS News. “We’re going to blow them up and kill the people that want to poison America, and we’re now going to expand operations, I think, to the land.”

A proper summation of Graham’s foreign policy doctrine can perhaps be best expressed in his own words. Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit on 31 October 2025, Graham crowed: “I feel good about the Republican party. I feel good about where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people, and we’re cutting your taxes.”

But what has all this feelgood killing brought? While no longer on the front page, the genocide in Gaza continues, even after the so-called ceasefire of October 2025. “Israel has killed 20,000 children and injured 44,000 more since 7 October 2023,” according to a recent United Nations independent commission finding, which also determined: “Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide and atrocity crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank.”

In Lebanon, Israeli air strikes continue to kill children and erase entire families. The war in Iran has resumed, again, with little chance that it will be much different in the near future. The Caribbean Sea persists in being viewed as a lawless killing zone by this administration. Graham’s hawkish attitude isn’t a doctrine heading in the right direction. It is decades of failed foreign policy continuing the same misdeeds at ever increasing rates.

The hawkish senator from South Carolina has passed on. Mourn him if you wish, but let’s also be honest about what he promoted. His fervent desire to project US and Israeli military might across the world, regardless of the cost, is an abject political and ethical failure. The longer this ideology lives on, the more peril we will all face.

• Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York