July 15—U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina known for his unbridled enthusiasm for unconstitutional U.S. imperial wars, died Saturday night, after returning from a short visit to Ukraine. Graham’s trip was the tenth he had made since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. It was his Russophobia and hatred for Putin which led him to demand that the United States and NATO fully arm the Ukrainian armed forces, including the neo-Nazi militias embedded in the security forces, to kill as many Russians as possible.
A Servant of the Military-Industrial Complex
His history as a war hawk was established long before the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine sharpened his focus on Putin. Since his election to the Senate in 2002, Graham was a supporter of every imperial war, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and President Barack Obama’s deployment in 2009 of 35,000 troops to Afghanistan. He later called for a permanent occupation of that country. In 2011, he supported Obama’s participation in the destruction of Libya, and the dirty “civil war” in Syria.
According to investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S., Graham emerged “as a man who was never able to leave the Cold War behind,” seeing dangerous enemies everywhere. This made him an ideal frontman for the military-industrial complex. In his role with the Senate Committee on Armed Services and later with the Committee on the Budget, he fought for increasing the budget allocations to defense-sector cartels, which rewarded him with significant campaign contributions.
For example, in 2015, he coauthored the Graham-Ayotte Amendment, which provided increased funding for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). The OCO was one of the “black box” agencies used to hide non-budgeted military expenditures, to cover operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine. When his amendment passed in March 2015, OCO funding jumped from $58 billion to $96 billion.
For this work, he received $760,000 in campaign contributions in 2015-16 from defense sector officials and corporate political action committees (PACs). From 2019 to 2024, Boeing, which has a manufacturing center in Charleston, South Carolina, gave him $55,000 from its PAC, and he received contributions from Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. He provided cover for Lockheed Martin’s troubled roll-out of the F-35 combat aircraft.
Graham’s Obsession with Putin and Russia
Graham’s obsession with Putin predated the SMO. An example of this was the “fact-finding tour” he made in December 2016, travelling with fellow war hawks Senator John McCain and Senator Amy Klobuchar. While in the frontline village of Shirokino in Donetsk, they met members of the Nazi Banderite Azov Battalion. A video of the event showed him and McCain joking with the Azov militia members, some with Ukrainian Nazi symbols visible on their uniforms. McCain praised them, then delivered a message to the Russian President: “You will never be able to defeat the Ukrainian people and take away their independence and freedom.”
In spite of his up-close encounter with the Nazi elements which Putin identified as an existential security concern for Russia, Graham repeatedly attacked Putin’s insistence that their presence in the military and government was a legitimate security threat to Russia. He dismissed the murderous assaults on ethnic Russians in the Donbas by Azov and related militias, which resulted in more than 14,000 casualties in the time between the Maidan coup and the SMO, describing them as a defense against the deployment of secret Russian special forces.
Calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “liar,” a “thug” and a “bully,” Graham demanded that the United States provide arms and training for Ukraine, which had been underway in a covert joint effort by the CIA and British MI6, initiated shortly after the coup in 2014. (This was the subject of a New York Times special report, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” published on March 29, 2025.)
Following the launch of the SMO, Graham called for the United States and NATO to provide air defense for Ukraine, and long-range missiles to strike targets deep into Russia. When questioned about the billions of dollars of weapons and aid provided by the administrations of Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, he shrugged off the costs, describing the sums as a “good deal,” as they “produced dead Russians.”
In March 2023, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of his excitement that “the Russians are dying,” declaring that U.S. support for Ukraine was “the best money we ever spent.” In congressional hearings, he lied that the funds were really loans—knowing they would never be repaid—or that the costs would be covered by U.S. seizure of Ukraine’s raw material wealth!
On September 26, 2024, after meeting with Zelensky in Washington, Graham blasted President Biden for “holding back aid,” due to worries about escalation. He said Zelensky must be allowed “to execute his plan, which includes hitting legitimate military targets inside Russia,” warning that if Putin were not stopped, “it will unleash China on Taiwan, and Putin will not stop in Ukraine.”
His delusional belief in the “Russian threat” against Europe put him in league with the “European three,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, the now-ousted Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the UK, and President Emmanuel Macron of France, who called for special funds to be made available for a substantial militarization in Europe. According to a report in Le Monde Diplomatique in February 2026, he held secret meetings with French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot throughout the spring of 2025, to coordinate their shared objective “to block Vladimir Putin’s colonial war through the threat of sanctions”—at a time when President Trump was denouncing his former European allies for disrupting his peace offensive.
This was the subject in Graham’s talks with Zelensky during his final trip to Ukraine. He reported to the Ukrainian puppet leader (whose five-year term as President of Ukraine ended on May 20, 2024) that President Trump had agreed to his demand that Ukraine be granted a license to produce Patriot defensive missile systems, and a tough new round of sanctions targeting nations purchasing Russian oil and gas. He claimed that his “Sanctioning Russia Act” had 85 co-signers in the Senate, and that he would guide it through upon his return to Washington. His death was used by supporters to tighten bipartisan support, with Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, saying, “There can be no more fitting tribute to Lindsey.”
Support for Netanyahu’s Genocide
Graham was equally unhinged in his support for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regime’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the overall Greater Israel policy. In an interview in February 2026, Graham defended Israel’s murder of children in Gaza by saying the death of Palestinian children was necessary to ensure the survival of Israel. Asked if this view represented “Christian values,” he compared it to allied attacks in World War II! “Did we hesitate while bombing German cities, starving civilians, or dropping bombs on every city until it was destroyed? War is brutal.” To defeat Hamas in Gaza, Graham argued, Israel would be justified using nuclear weapons against them. “This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids,” he blustered.
This justification for Zionist genocide endeared him to Netanyahu, who was second only to President Trump in his praise for Graham. In reporting his death, Trump called him a “great American patriot,” saying, “Essentially we agree on almost everything.” Netanyahu called him “one of the great champions of the American-Israel alliance,” adding “I’ve lost a beloved friend.”
Needless to say, Graham fully supported the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, vilifying Iran’s leaders as “religious Nazis” and spreading the lie that Iran was “weeks away” from possessing nuclear weapons. He had stood by McCain’s side when he called for bombing Iran instead of negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. He shared Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran, tweeting in January 2024, “Hit Iran now. Hit them hard.”
Has President Donald Trump, who ran in 2024 as a “peace candidate” committed to reducing the budget deficit, reversed his campaign promises to side with the war hawks he once ferociously denounced? He seems, at some level, to be aware that the shutting down of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a consequence of the collapse of the ceasefire based on a seemingly abandoned Memorandum of Understanding, threatens to unleash a global financial disruption, making him the new Herbert Hoover.
With bi-partisan support for Graham’s demands for more defense spending, the U.S. deficit has ballooned to record levels. Graham, as Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Budget, presided over a record growth in U.S. debt. The debt grew by $1.9 trillion in fiscal year 2026, and net interest on the federal debt has reached $24 billion per week. Trump and Graham agreed on a massive increase in defense spending for next fiscal year, which will add $500 billion to the nearly $1 trillion previously in the budget.
The huge budget increase for the wars in Europe and Southwest Asia—which the U.S. had no chance of “winning”—and the subsequent austerity pushed as a consequence of the wars, did not dampen Graham’s clownish enthusiasm for endless wars. On November 6, 2025 he was greeted by wild cheers when he told delegates at a conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition, “I feel good about the Republican Party and where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people and we’re cutting your taxes…. Trump is my favorite President.” And in a March 8 interview on FOX News, he expressed similar sentiments, when he said of the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran, “When this [Iranian] regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we’re going to make a ton of money.”
Graham’s death may have spared him of the blame for the coming round of military defeats and financial implosion. But, as his history shows, his legacy is that of an unrepentant war criminal.
