Our Best Stuff on Lindsey Graham, the Iran War, and More
The Dispatch · RC · trust 44/100
Unlocked Dispatch Weekly Our Best Stuff on Lindsey Graham, the Iran War, and More The South Carolina senator passed away unexpectedly at age 71. Rachael Larimore / July 18, 2026 Loading Sen. Lindsey Graham at the U.S. Capitol on April 27, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images) Sen. Lindsey Graham at the U.S. Capitol on April 27, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images) = 3 && ageInMonths 3 months old . Some information may be outdated.'; } else if (ageInMonths = 6 && ageInMonths 6 months old . Some information may be outdated.'; } else if (ageInMonths = 12 && ageInMonths 1 year old . Some information may be outdated.'; } else if (ageInMonths = 12) { const ageInYears = Math.floor(ageInMonths / 12); this.message = `This post is more than ${ageInYears} ${ageInYears === 1 ? 'year' : 'years'} old . Some information may be outdated.`; } } }" { this.tooltipOpen = false; }, 200); } }" class="relative" Audio Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening.
Text Size { this.tooltipOpen = false; }, 200); } }" class="relative" Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall.
That episode is a microcosm of Graham’s complicated legacy: He was known for his bipartisanship (he worked on a comprehensive immigration reform package in 2013 that ultimately died in the House, and he voted for both of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees), was a staunch interventionist on foreign policy (he was a leading advocate for the Iraq surge in 2007), and … he was very close to Donald Trump.
Graham was a forceful critic of Trump before the 2016 election, and he condemned the events of January 6, 2021, saying that night on the Senate floor, “Count me out. Enough is enough.” But he also built a friendship with the president and was frequently his golf partner. In his piece on Graham’s death, Michael Warren attributed Graham’s cozying up to Trump as a product of his desire to pursue influence—he always sought to be “in the room where things happen.” Michael wrote :
As a hawk in a party that, under Trump’s influence, was already skewing dovish by 2017, Graham was a counterweight to another erstwhile intraparty Trump opponent, Sen. Rand Paul, on matters of national security and foreign policy. If Paul and other noninterventionists saw in Trump a compatriot against dumb foreign wars, Graham saw a willing convert to his interventionist cause—Trump didn’t want to look weak like Obama or Joe Biden, did he? Graham learned how to sell Trump on tough talk and even action in the Middle East, and then publicly praised him for it.
In Boiling Frogs , Nick Catoggio pondered whether there was a “Graham era” in Republican politics, given that the senator served during both the Bush and Trump eras. He concludes that yes, the Graham era is a useful way to understand the evolution of the GOP. But that viewpoint doesn’t necessarily flatter Graham. He wrote :
Much of what came out of the Senate since 2003 had his fingerprints on it to some extent. “In South Carolina, Washington and especially overseas, he wielded enormous influence over federal spending, the courts and national security,” Politico ’s Jonathan Martin correctly observed.
You tell me: Is America better or worse off with respect to spending, national security, and the rule of law than it was 23 years ago?
To say that Graham doesn’t bear primary responsibility for our steep national decline is true, but it’s also true that he either accelerated or did little to try to reverse the trends that led to it.
Graham was also a longtime champion of U.S. intervention in Iran, and he was working to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel before his death. However ambitious his hopes were on that matter, he recognized that it could happen only after the war was contained. The latest hostilities between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic ensure that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
The U.S. has conducted strikes on Iranian targets all week, Iran has struck U.S. installations and other sites across the Gulf region, and the Strait of Hormuz remains a point of contention. On Monday, Trump threatened to charge a 20 percent toll “on all cargo shipped” through the strait, before walking that back on Tuesday. As Kevin Williamson noted , “we’re the pirates” now. And he suspects none of this is going to go well for the U.S.:
The Trump administration has been fought to an effective standstill by Tehran, which pulled off the remarkable feat of gaining a strategic asset—effective control of the Strait of Hormuz—as a result of a war in which it has not won a single engagement. The U.S. is now trying to recover from that descent into geopolitical buffoonery. Trump may declare total victory twice a week, but in the real world the likeliest outcome is one that is economically and strategically worse for the United States than the status quo ante bellum .
Got it. We won't recommend this newsletter for a while.
We published an interesting piece from Jonathan Ruhe, a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and an expert on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the Iran nuclear deal. He argues that the deal Obama negotiated forever changed negotiations between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic.
For the Obama administration, clinching the JCPOA showed the value of persistence and flexibility in achieving a diplomatic breakthrough, even if the results were open to serious criticism. According to this logic, further engagement might produce better agreements. Since then, Trump and Joe Biden —and then Trump again —sought renewed talks to reach an improved settlement. Iran’s takeaway pointed in the opposite direction. The JCPOA was so freighted with meaning, for both its advocates and detractors in Washington, because it represented a first in our multidecade standoff with the Islamic Republic. For Tehran, the deal was tolerable precisely because it was…
Read the original at The Dispatch →
Open in TruthVane →