Lindsey Graham is a complicated figure for the media. When they are confronted with a person who supports the same cause as they do in one major area – Ukraine – while at the same time being an enemy in another major area – Israel – they reveal who they are and what they stand for. It is not a pretty sight.
They are unable to live with contradictions.
Together with John McCain, Graham was an enthusiastic participant in the military build-up of Ukraine from 2014 onwards. They viewed Ukraine as a spearhead against Russia and discarded many of the considerations of caution that had characterised US policy towards the Soviet Union ever since Ambassador George Kennan’s famous dispatch from Moscow in 1949, in which he advocated the policy of containment: containment, not confrontation.
Traditionally, Norway pursued the same policy – no military exercises east of the 47th meridian, no nuclear weapons on Norwegian soil, no permanent stationing of foreign troops in Norway. Even the pre-positioning of equipment sparked debate about whether this cautious line was being abandoned.
Now everything is permitted throughout the Nordic region. That can scarcely end well. Graham is one station along that road.
Ukraine has served as the justification for advancing positions vis-à-vis Russia.
The base agreements concluded with all the Nordic countries, which granted the Americans territorial sovereignty, represent a major step by Nordic standards and were bound to provoke fears of encirclement in Moscow.
This has not been Trump’s policy. Trump’s policy is defensive. He wants Greenland in order to build a missile shield over North America. But the new warmongers in both the United States and Western Europe have an interest in portraying it as aggressive.
If people were informed about how offensive the new NATO is towards Russia, they would be frightened out of their wits. Instead, they are kept in the dark.
This is where Lindsey Graham enters the picture. He travelled to Ukraine early on together with McCain and Victoria Nuland in order to install a regime that would play their game. If the United States had allowed the Iraq War to develop into a permanent war, it was now Ukraine’s turn to assume the same role.
With a neighbour possessing 6,000 nuclear weapons, this was gambling with the future of the Earth.
But that is precisely what characterises neoconservatism 2.0. They are extraordinarily willing to take risks.
Tulsi Gabbard has revealed that they had 120 biological laboratories around the world, many of them in Ukraine.
Key role
Ukraine also played a key role in the coup against Trump, both before the 2016 election, when the Crossfire Hurricane counter-intelligence operation was launched, and after the election, when Obama intervened and ordered new intelligence reports claiming that the Russians had helped Trump to victory. It made no difference that the claims were false.
The same forces that sought to convict Trump for maintaining that the 2020 election was rigged themselves claimed after 2016 that Trump owed his victory to Putin. Hillary said this even though no evidence has ever been produced.
The Norwegian media have faithfully followed Hillary’s narrative – and continue to do so.
They side with Lindsey Graham in the military build-up of Ukraine.
But their view of Israel collides with his.
For Graham was every bit as bellicose on Israel’s behalf as he was on Ukraine’s. This applied to weapons, intelligence, annexations and support for the settlers.
But today’s woke politicians are unable to live with contradictions. They therefore turned against Graham and welcomed his death.
Extremists
They are far more extreme than Graham ever was.
Graham was easy to understand. Trump kept his distance. He was not a supporter of Graham, as NTB wrote.
Graham was willing to take risks. But so too are our politicians, who are gambling both with Russia and with Israel. There is, after all, a price to be paid for turning against Israel. We have seen this during the Iran war, in which Støre and the Norwegian media support Iran.
Israel’s standing in the United States is no longer what it once was. It is low among younger voters and among Democrats. Shockingly low. Forty of the Senate’s 47 Democrats voted in favour of halting arms exports. Those are figures so significant that Trump, and any president after him, will have to take them into account.
According to Pew, 60 per cent of Americans now hold an unfavourable view of Israel. The younger they are, the higher this proportion becomes. Three-quarters of those aged between 18 and 29 sympathise more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, according to a separate NBC poll conducted last weekend. As the baby-boomer generation dies out, America’s anti-Israel sentiment is likely to become even stronger. Fewer and fewer Americans see Israel as David standing up to the Arab world’s Goliath. More and more associate the country with heavy-handed militarism.
Dan Luce, who writes this in the Financial Times, is probably not enthusiastic about present-day Israel himself. That comes through clearly. Nevertheless, the figures are serious.
AP recently published an article conveying the same message.
Luce is among those promoting the theory – not to say the conspiracy theory – that it was Netanyahu who persuaded Trump to go to war, while Trump’s own advisers were, to varying degrees, reluctant.
It is, of course, Trump alone who bears responsibility for dragging the United States into this war, which resulted from an impulse. But, as The New York Times reported, Netanyahu’s voice was the most prominent in urging Trump to proceed. Trump’s own advisers, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, all expressed varying degrees of scepticism. Netanyahu was not a puppet master pulling the strings. But his ability to persuade Trump proved decisive.
That is, of course, a perfectly legitimate view. Trump is not someone who is easily led by the nose. He has now looked into the hearts of the Revolutionary Guard and the ayatollahs, and found only darkness.
Graham returned home from his tenth visit to Ukraine on Friday evening. By Saturday he was dead. Surprisingly, he left behind very little wealth. Most members of Congress know how to enrich themselves through insider trading.
Another prominent Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is also lying in a hospital bed, and no one knows how he will fare. His wife is Chinese and was in Beijing when her husband fell ill. Some say they have spoken to him recently; others say he is brain-dead. Illness and death are turning Washington upside down.