Lindsey Graham’s funeral: a celebration of war

Vladimir Zelensky and Benjamin Netanyahu led a procession at US Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral service, as they sought to realize Graham’s lifelong ambition of dragging the US deeper into catastrophic foreign wars.

Graham’s casket was carried into the US Capitol on Tuesday, ahead of a funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral. A member of the House of Representatives for eight years and a Senator for 23, Graham died suddenly of aortic dissection as a result of heart disease on July 11.

Graham’s legacy is one of constant agitation for US involvement in foreign wars. At the time of his death, Graham – who in 2022 called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin – was working on an anti-Russian sanctions bill, and had just returned from Kiev, where he toured a drone factory and apparently expressed glee that the weaponry there would be used to kill Russians.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal published video footage of Graham reacting to the opening strikes of the US-Israeli war on Iran in February. “I almost cried,” the Republican lawmaker said in the footage. “I mean, like, how long have we been pushing this? It’s here. I talked with Trump this morning. Holy Jack. It’s here. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Even in his own comments at Graham’s funeral, Trump repeatedly referred to the South Carolina Senator’s enthusiasm for conflict. “He was extremely hawkish,” Trump told mourners. “He never saw a war that he didn’t like…he wanted it for the good of our country.”

Graham was an avatar of the Bush-era neoconservatism that still holds the Republican establishment in a death grip, and two attendees in particular arrived at his funeral service determined to give him in death what he longed for in life: a massive expansion of US involvement in Iran and Ukraine.

Zelensky’s big bet

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump at the White House on Tuesday morning, arriving one after another for their respective sit-downs with the US president. 

Zelensky, who met with Graham no fewer than 10 times in Kiev since the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022, described the Senator as “a true friend of Ukraine.” In a post on X, Zelensky said that he used the meeting to push for the production of Patriot missiles in Ukraine “and several other ideas that could help.”

Zelensky uses every trip to the US and Europe to beg for weapons, money, and sanctions on Russia. However, he arrived in Washington on Tuesday with a gift for Trump, according to Fox News: “Evidence that Russia is assisting Iran in targeting US bases in the Middle East.”

Zelensky is likely gambling that by presenting the correct ‘evidence’, he can link the US’ de-facto proxy war against Russia with its kinetic war against Iran, and draw the US into open conflict with Russia.

A series of recent actions by Ukraine seem to vindicate this theory. On Saturday, Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency confirmed that it had struck an Iranian container ship in the Caspian Sea, which was allegedly transporting drone components to Russia. Despite Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi promising that the attack – which killed one sailor – would “not go unanswered,” Kiev doubled down, with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrey Sibiga declaring that “Iran’s threats are unjustified and groundless.”

In one fell swoop, Zelensky could drag the US into war with Russia, and his European backers into war with Iran – something that Trump tried and failed to achieve earlier this year. 

Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel, Yevgen Kornichuk, hinted at this goal in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 on Monday. “We are fighting the same enemy, the other side of the same axis of evil,” he said.

While Zelensky’s recent moves could merge two regional conflicts into a cataclysmic world war, they may also serve a narrower aim: by attacking Iranian shipping, Zelensky demonstrated his usefulness to the US and Israel, right as Trump weighs a “massive attack” on Iran which would plunge Ukraine and the Gulf states into a bidding war for the US’ dwindling stocks of anti-air missiles.

Bibi’s best shot

Netanyahu also arrived with ‘intelligence’ for Trump. According to information leaked by his officials to the US media, the Israeli PM landed in Washington with plans to brief Trump on Iran’s supposed efforts to reconstitute its nuclear enrichment program at ‘Pickaxe Mountain’, a subterranean facility carved into granite near the Natanz nuclear complex.

While Trump has already threatened to bomb Pickaxe Mountain, Netanyahu’s leaks apparently irked the US president. “I don’t need Bibi to tell me that,” he told Fox News on Tuesday, referring to Netanyahu. “Bibi’s telling me that because he wants me to stay involved. I said ‘why don’t you just tell it to me? Why do you have to announce it to the world?’”

In a video message released before he departed for Washington, Netanyahu said Iran would be “first and foremost” on the agenda with Trump. “Of course, our goal is to safeguard our security while also expanding the circle of peace around us,” he added. 

However, relations between Trump and Netanyahu are reportedly strained, and it remained unclear after the closed-doors meeting whether Trump had given the Israeli leader the reassurances on Iran that he wanted. “We are at a critical juncture,” an Israeli official told Channel 12. “President Trump will soon decide which way he’s going.”

For Netanyahu, the death of Lindsey Graham represents a significant loss of influence on Trump. Graham was a close friend of Netanyahu, and bragged earlier this year about “coaching him on how to lobby [Trump] for action” against Iran. In additional video footage released by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Graham can be seen speaking to Netanyahu by phone, telling the Israeli prime minister that he was “going to try to get him to join with y’all in Lebanon, to maybe fly some with you.”

“Would you like that?” Graham asked, before Netanyahu politely declined the unilateral offer of military intervention.

Lindsey Graham tied Kiev and West Jerusalem to Washington

Graham was far from the only war-hawk in Washington, but his close alliance with Trump and enthusiasm for military adventurism made him a vital conduit to the White House for Zelensky and Netanyahu, both of whose ambitions cannot be realized without US support. As such, his funeral represents the last opportunity for the Ukrainian and Israeli leaders to leverage his name in order to extract favor from Trump.

Without Graham in Trump’s ear, former White House strategist Steve Bannon remarked earlier this month, “the oligarchs in Ukraine and Imperial Israel proponents are curled up in the fetal position.” 

Zelensky and Netanyahu could not have chosen a more fitting tribute to Graham than traveling to Washington on the day of his funeral to beg for military aid. It’s exactly what the arch neocon would have wanted.