Lindsey Graham tributes from Israel and Ukraine point to complicated, often bloody legacy

Summary

Republican senator, who died Saturday, had a global reach few could rival and was vital in shaping Trump’s worldview It was revealing that one of the first tributes to Lindsey Graham, a US senator who died on Saturday aged 71, 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 100 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 2003 he was a cheerleader for George W Bush’s war in Iraq. After a spell in the House of Representatives, Graham had only been in the Senate for a month when in 2003, 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. Bush’s decision to go to war has been described by one influential thinktank as the worst foreign policy blunder in US history. 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. In April, Graham was among guests at a British embassy garden party in Washington attended by King Charles and Queen Camilla.