Sean Dempsey | 07/14/26
It is a circumstance of no small moment, upon the fortunate death of Senator Lindsey Graham on the 12th of July in the year 2026, that the customary veil of funeral oratory should be torn aside. This is not the season for misty recollections of a “true American patriot” or a “humanitarian loved by the Israeli people.” Such language serves only to obscure what the record plainly shows: a career spanning more than two decades in which the senator from South Carolina devoted himself, with rare consistency and without evident remorse, to the proposition that American arms, treasure, and young lives ought to be placed at the disposal of a foreign power whenever that power demanded it. For this American statesman did not merely support Israel; he placed Israel above the evident interests of this Republic which he was sworn to serve. And he did so while urging methods of warfare so total that even the architects of Dresden or Tokyo might have blushed in horror.
This “venerable” late senator’s public statements on the matter of Gaza furnish as clear a window into his character as any historian could desire. He declared without qualification or apparent concern for proportion: “Do in Gaza what we did in Tokyo and Berlin. Level the place!” The date was late 2024, in the context of urging a “full military effort” to “take Gaza down.” On another blood-soaked occasion, on May 12th 2024 he elaborated the same doctrine by explicit reference to the atomic bombings: “When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. That was the right decision. Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war. They can’t afford to lose. So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state. Whatever you have to do.”
Nor was this an isolated effusion. On the 9th of March 2026, scarcely four months before his own death, he stated with theatrical finality: “I’m not with you, I’m with Israel, until my dying day.” These honest assertions capture well his true loyalties with admirable precision.
On still another occasion he announced that there was “no limit” to civilian casualties that would cause him to question Israel’s campaign, provided the goal remained the destruction of a captive people. The date of that particular clarification was in 2025. He repeated the essential sentiment, that unarmed women, children must be destroyed utterly and that Israel must be given every tool, without restraint, on multiple occasions throughout 2023, 2024, and 2025.
His enthusiasm for unrestrained force and unmitigated bloodlust was not confined to Gaza. On October 15th 2023, he warned Iran: “If you escalate this war, we’re coming for you.” He described the Iranian regime in hyperbolic fashion as “religious Nazis… who would use a nuclear weapon if they possessed one,” a fanciful and propaganda-fueled formulation he employed as late as January 2026. In 2015 he characterized the well-structured and enforceable Iran nuclear agreement as “the biggest mistake any president of the United States could make,” predicting it would produce “a Sunni-Shiite war from hell” and empower oppressors. He had earlier, in 2013, pressed for American military strikes against Syria, insisting that failure to act would demonstrate an “uncertain trumpet” and that any observer who could not perceive the connection between Syria and Iran was “blind at a time when history needs for you to have good eyesight.”
The pattern extended backward and forward across two decades. As a member of the House of Representatives in 2002 he voted for the authorization of force against Iraq and publicly argued that regime change was necessary to remove a dictator who threatened regional stability and, by extension, American interests. He later supported the surge in Afghanistan and resisted calls for timely withdrawal, maintaining that American military presence must continue until objectives he deemed essential were met. He advocated arming and training opposition forces in Syria, pushed for sustained pressure on North Korea, and, in the final years of his life, became one of the most vocal proponents of unlimited military assistance to Ukraine while simultaneously demanding that Israel receive whatever weapons it requested without conditions.
Consider for a moment the following profane utterances demanding war and unending death, a mere sampling drawn from the public record and spaced across the years 2002 to 2026, which illustrate the consistency of his counsel:
- 2002 (House statements and floor remarks): Support for Iraq regime change as essential to American security.
- September 2013 (Senate statements and interviews on Syria): “If you can’t see the connection between Syria and Iran, you’re blind at a time when history needs for you to have good eyesight.”
- 2015 (multiple appearances on the Iran nuclear deal): “This decision is the biggest mistake any president of the United States could make.”
- October 2023: “If you escalate this war, we’re coming for you” (addressed to Iran).
5–9. Repeated statements throughout 2023–2025: Israel must “destroy Hamas” with no negotiation possible and must receive every weapon requested. - May 2024: Explicit comparison to Hiroshima and Nagasaki together with the injunction “Israel, do whatever you have to do.”
- Late 2024: “Do in Gaza what we did in Tokyo and Berlin. Level the place!”
- 2025: “No limit” to civilian casualties acceptable if Hamas is destroyed.
- January 2026: The Iranian regime consists of “religious Nazis.”
- 9 March 2026: “I’m not with you, I’m with Israel, until my dying day.”
- On at least five additional occasions between 2023 and 2026, in Senate speeches, television appearances, and press releases, he reiterated that Israel must receive every weapon requested, that proportionality was irrelevant, and that American policy must align unconditionally with Israeli objectives in Gaza and against Iran.
The common thread, sadly, is quite unmistakable. Whether the theater was Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, or Gaza, this monster’s prescription was always, notoriously, the same: more force, more blood, more hate, fewer restraints, and an open-ended commitment of American resources.
Unpatriotic critics who observed that such a posture risked wider regional war, ran afoul of the Constitution, drained the treasury, and subordinated American interests to those of a single ally were dismissed as isolationists. These fringe lunatics were vilified by their own party. The few statesmen who advocated Constitutional restraint (what a juvenile belief!) were primaried. Meanwhile, the senator’s own words left little room for ambiguity on the priority: Israel first, last, and always! America’s interests be damned if they conflict with those of Israel.
For it remains prudent to observe that the policies so vigorously promoted by the late senator did not arise in a vacuum, but were formed part of a longer and well-documented history of American military subvention to the state of Israel. Beginning in earnest after the conflicts of 1967 and 1973, when the United States first undertook to supply that state with advanced aircraft and other implements of war on a substantial scale, the practice has continued without serious interruption for more than half a century. What commenced as a calculated response to Soviet influence in the region has hardened into a standing obligation, formalized in successive memoranda of understanding, by which the American treasury transfers several billions of dollars annually (principally in the form of grants for the purchase of weapons manufactured in the United States) supplemented whenever fresh hostilities erupt by emergency packages whose size and speed of delivery are limited only by the ingenuity of appropriators.
The unprejudiced observer will find it all but impossible to conclude that this sustained experiment in arming and encouraging one party to every regional dispute has strengthened the position of the United States or contributed to the safety of the world. On the contrary, the policy has produced a Levant more heavily militarized, more prone to sudden escalation, and more thoroughly entangled with American prestige than at any previous period. Each round of conflict has been met not with demands for diplomatic settlement or measured response, but with fresh infusions of American munitions and political cover, thereby ensuring that the weaker party is driven to seek asymmetric means of resistance while the stronger party is relieved of any compelling incentive to exercise restraint. The result has been a cycle in which American resources are consumed, American diplomatic capital is expended in defense of actions that command diminishing support abroad, and new adversaries are recruited to the ranks of those who regard the United States as the ultimate guarantor of policies they find intolerable.
It is difficult in the extreme to maintain, with any appearance of seriousness, that the republic has emerged from this arrangement stronger than it entered it. The financial burden, though masked by the circumstance that much of the appropriated sum returns to domestic manufacturers of armaments, nevertheless represents an opportunity cost of considerable magnitude at a time when internal needs (e.g. bridges, ports, schools, and the ordinary maintenance of civil society) go unmet or are addressed only after protracted and acrimonious debate. The military establishment finds itself committed to the defense of positions and the resupply of operations whose primary beneficiary is a foreign government, while the broader strategic posture of the United States grows more rigid and more vulnerable to overextension. Diplomatic influence, once exercised with some claim to impartiality, is now widely perceived as subordinate to the requirements of a single client, with consequent damage to credibility in other quarters of the globe. And the domestic polity, already riven by its own divisions, is further inflamed by the spectacle of unconditional support for foreign conflicts whose costs are borne by citizens who have little voice in their prosecution.
The world at large has fared no better. A policy whose stated purpose was the promotion of stability has instead contributed to a regional arms race, to the radicalization of populations subjected to repeated military operations, and to the formation of opportunistic coalitions among states that might otherwise have remained at odds. Technologies and tactics once confined to conventional battlefields have proliferated, ensuring that future confrontations, when they arrive, will be conducted with greater destructive power and with less regard for distinctions between combatant and noncombatant. The perpetual preparation for the next crisis has not averted crisis; it has merely postponed larger reckonings while rendering them more dangerous when they finally materialize.
Men of Lindsey Graham’s particular cast of mind have been indispensable to the maintenance of this state of affairs. By their insistence that any qualification of support for Israeli operations constituted a species of disloyalty, by their repeated demands for the removal of conditions on aid, and by their rhetorical reduction of every regional dispute to a simple contest between civilization and its enemies, they have succeeded in shielding the policy from the ordinary processes of scrutiny and adjustment that apply to other claims upon the public purse. They have treated the security of one foreign state as an absolute that overrides considerations of American solvency, American cohesion, and American standing among nations.
In the circumstances, the recent death of a senator who embodied this tendency with such singular consistency and without apparent reservation may be accounted, by those who retain any preference for peaceable relations among nations and for the prudent management of their own affairs, as a development not entirely without its compensations. It removes from the public councils a voice that never wearied of advocating escalation and that never paused to weigh the accumulating costs to the country he represented. His passing ought not to be an occasion for the customary rituals of veneration, particularly among those whose acquaintance with the record is limited to slogans rather than to the substance of two decades of public statements. It should instead be received as a bold but genuine occasion for the reassertion of common sense in the conduct of foreign policy… a reminder that the interests of the American republic are not identical with the maximal objectives of any foreign government, however closely allied, and that the perpetual subsidization of brinkmanship is a luxury no nation in the present condition of the world can indefinitely afford. Whether that reminder will be heeded remains an open question; but the removal of one of its most unyielding obstacles is at least a necessary preliminary.
So let the obituaries who speak only of “patriotism” and “humanitarianism” be filed alongside the other fictions of the postmodern age. The truth, for those willing to consult the senator’s own statements rather than the pieties of his eulogists, is considerably less flattering and far more instructive. He has now gone to whatever judgment awaits such careers. The rest of us are left with the consequences of the policies he championed so assiduously and with the obligation to remember him, not as a hazy statesman, but as the bloodthirsty Israel-first advocate he consistently showed himself to be. For let history never forget this sadistic monster and true villain to humanity.
