Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) pushed President Donald Trump to attack Iran as a way of solidifying his legacy, similarly to how former President Ronald Reagan contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.
In his private conversations with the president, Graham viewed the Islamic regime as an obstacle to long-term peace in the Middle East.
“We were thinking about this early, early on about how Iran is a spoiler for expanding the Abraham Accords and stability in the Mideast,” he told Politico in an interview published Wednesday. “I told him before he took office … if you can collapse this terrorist regime, that’s Berlin Wall stuff.”
During Trump’s first term in 2020, the Abraham Accords were established between Israel and several Arab nations. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain initially signed the Trump-brokered agreement. They were later joined by Sudan and Morocco.
The second Trump administration intends to add more signatories to the Abraham Accords — namely, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Kazakhstan agreed to join in November 2025, and Somaliland pledged to join the accords late last year after Israel recognized it as a separate country from Somalia.
Toppling Iran’s leadership will likely accelerate the expansion of the Abraham Accords, Signum Global Advisors’ Charles Myers told CNBC this week.
Concerns about the security threat that Iran poses to the region were proven true when it fired missiles and drones toward Qatar, Kuwait, and other Gulf states. The neighboring countries have aligned themselves against Iran as the Islamic Republic sustains widespread damage from joint U.S.-Israel strikes in “Operation Epic Fury.”
Graham, for one, is in favor of the Iran operation and supports the idea of regime change. Trump has said one of the goals for the conflict is to free the Iranian people from their oppressors and help pave a path toward new leadership.
The longtime Republican senator hopes better leaders can rise up in Iran, but warned that the U.S. will target the country again in the future if its weapons pose a national security threat.
“If they want to reconstitute their country, to build more nuclear weapons and more missiles to hit us, we’ll treat the new people like we did the old people,” he said in the Politico interview. “I just don’t believe it. I think they’re going to find a way to … be a different country.”
LINDSEY GRAHAM ALREADY MOVES ON FROM IRAN, WARNS ‘CUBA IS NEXT’
Graham made the push to strike Iran during a game of golf at Trump’s West Palm Beach club last month, the Washington Examiner previously reported, when the president was considering his options for Iran. The senator is said to have tailored his message around Trump’s legacy.
“The message is that this is a generational opportunity to transform the Middle East, a transformational opportunity,” a former administration official said. “Iran has never in its 47 years experienced this kind of economic collapse, political collapse, environmental collapse, military collapse, and has no internal legitimacy, with massive infighting.”
The South Carolina senator has been one of the most vocal politicians in favor of an operation in the Middle East, with Sen. Tim Burchett (R-TN) saying, “Lindsey hasn’t seen a fist fight that he hasn’t wanted to turn into a bombing raid, so I just take it with a grain of salt, dude.”
