On Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham wished Senator Rand Paul a happy birthday.
“To Senator (Rand Paul), Happy Birthday!” Graham posted on X. “I hope today is full of family, friends and good cheer.”
The South Carolina Republican added, “Oh by the way, as a birthday present we have seized yet another oil tanker trying to transport sanctioned Venezuelan oil. I hear Russia isn’t too happy.”
“Next year to celebrate, maybe we can do a golf outing to Venezuela and Cuba!” he added. “Should be good to go by then.”
He was celebrating Donald Trump’s military actions in and around Venezuela, including cashiering the nation’s President Nicolas Maduro and potentially changing the entire regime—something Graham wants to see replicated in Cuba.
The birthday boy responded.
“Thanks for the B-day greetings (Lindsey Graham),” Paul replied. “Replacing one socialist with another in Venezuela doesn’t bode well for golf though. Luxuries like golf flourish only under capitalism.”
Paul was referring to Venezuela’s new interim president, the hardline socialist Delcy Rodriguez, a key ally of the ousted Maduro.
Paul has long been outspoken against regime-change wars and the need for congressional approval for the U.S. to go to war, and has warned about the long-term, negative, unforeseen effects and results of war.
Trump now goes to war without Congress specifically to change regimes and doesn’t seem worried about the aftermath. Graham absolutely loves this, and seems almost orgasmic over the prospects of a war in Cuba, which he might get.
It wasn’t always this way.
As the Trump political phenomenon and movement began to take shape in 2015, the neoconservatives were first worried most about another Republican—Rand Paul and his 2016 presidential campaign.
When Graham also ran for president that year, his entire purpose for being in the race was to stop Paul and tamp down on simmering antiwar sentiment in the GOP, much of it cultivated by the popular 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of Rand’s libertarian icon father, the Texan Rep. Ron Paul.
Of course, Donald Trump bulldozed through Paul, Graham, Jeb Bush, and every other candidate to win the nomination and become the 45th president.
Paul and Trump would become friends and allies, so much that nearly two years into his presidency, POLITICO in August 2018 quoted an anonymous White House aide, “While Trump tolerates his hawkish advisers, the aide added, he shares a real bond with Paul: ‘He actually at gut level has the same instincts as Rand Paul.’”
The report observed, “Both Paul and Trump routinely rail against foreign entanglements, foreign wars, and foreign aid — positions characterized as isolationist by critics and as ‘America first’ by the president and his supporters.”
This Trump was the president who did not go to war with Iran in 2018, no matter how badly his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton and Sen. Graham wanted it. POLITICO observed, “the Kentucky senator and the commander-in-chief have bonded over a shared delight in thumbing their noses at experts the president likes to deride as ‘foreign policy eggheads,’ including those who work in his own administration.”
Trump and Paul didn’t always agree on foreign policy during this time, but Trump seemed to value the libertarian Republican’s counsel in the midst of so many Washington hawks.
This was the Trump that sought diplomacy with Russia, even using Paul as a vessel in that effort. This was the Trump who shocked the U.S. establishment by shaking hands with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in 2018.
More from POLITICO on how the Trump-Paul alliance took shape eight years ago:
[BLOCK]Paul has quietly emerged as an influential sounding board and useful ally for the president, who frequently clashes with his top advisers on foreign policy. The Kentucky senator’s relationship with Trump, developed via frequent cellphone calls and over rounds of golf at the president’s Virginia country club, became publicly apparent for the first time on Wednesday when the senator announced he had hand-delivered a letter to the Kremlin on Trump’s behalf.[/BLOCK]
Today, Paul is persona non grata to Trump. It is now Graham who plays golf with the president, and who seems to have the neoconservative Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s back in inner-circle conversations and politics.
And now American foreign policy looks a lot more like Rubio and Graham’s vision than Paul’s, or even Trump’s from just a few short years ago.
This is what makes Graham so very happy. Like his friend, the late Senator John McCain, like the Bush II team of Cheneys, Wolfowitzes, and Rumsfelds, and like the pundits and writers Bill Kristol and David Frum—for neocons, war is their business. It’s always their business.
Business is good right now. First up, Venezuela, maybe Cuba next. Neocons are riding high.
Paul openly blames America’s new war on Venezuela on Graham’s rounds of golf with this version of the president. He says Trump is now “under the thrall of Lindsey Graham.”
By the looks of it, he’s right.
Read the full article here
