Diplomacy after death at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral

Source: The Conversation – UK

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu sat on the same row in Washington National Cathedral this week to bid farewell to Republican US senator Lindsey Graham. But, for the two leaders, Graham’s funeral was also an opportunity for private talks at the White House with Donald Trump.

Graham was a passionate supporter of both Ukraine and Israel. A notable foreign policy hawk when it came to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Graham was instrumental in pushing through the latest round of sanctions, which the Senate passed in his honour on the day of the funeral.

If he was hawkish on Russia he was positively militant in his support for Israel. “I’ll stand with Israel until the day I die. It is our greatest ally,” Graham told the Jerusalem Post in an interview just a few months before his death. Video footage released this week showed him reacting rapturously to the bombardment of Iran on February 28. “Look what we’ve done here,” he said. “I almost cried. I mean, how long have we been pushing this?”

As David Dunn and Stefan Wolff, international affairs experts at the University of Birmingham, put it: “Summit meetings on the fringes of funerals … have a long and useful tradition.” It was a meeting on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral in April 2025 that enabled Zelensky to reset his relationship with Donald Trump, just two months after their notorious Oval Office confrontation.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the two leaders’ meetings with the US president were “positive and productive”. But, as Dunn and Wolff observe, the atmosphere in the Oval Office was likely to be far chillier for Netanyahu than for Zelensky.

The Ukrainian president’s stock has risen considerably in America in recent months, while Trump has been openly disparaging about Netanyahu lately. As we’ve observed before, the US president and Israeli prime minister have sharply divergent war aims.

Trump is looking for an off-ramp that will enable him to end the conflict, which is deeply unpopular in the US. Netanyahu, meanwhile, sees the war with Iran as unfinished business.

There was no post-meeting press conference, but Netanyahu emerged with the message: “This was one of the best conversations I have had with our friend, US President Donald Trump.” He would say that, though wouldn’t he, notes Christian Emery, an expert in international affairs at UCL. If Netanyahu is increasingly unpopular in the US, Trump is still very much in favour in Israel.

Emery believes Netanyahu would have needed to be particularly persuasive to get Trump to see his point of view over the Iran conflict. But it may be that Iran’s increasingly assertive conduct of the war, most recently hitting a US-owned tanker in Egypt as well as attacking a US base in Jordan, look as if they might be doing that job for him.

West Bank and Gaza

Israel’s conduct in Palestinian territories might be earning Netanyahu widespread opprobrium globally, but it reportedly plays well with an increasingly right-leaning Israeli electorate. And, with elections looming in October and the prime minister trailing in the polls, his government is escalating the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank while taking control of an ever larger portion of the Gaza Strip.

Irit Katz of the University of Cambridge, who has spent years studying conflict and displacement in Palestine, sees two motives behind this escalation. One is the aforementioned appeal to right-wing Zionist voters. The other, particularly for the more extreme elements in Netanyahu’s government, is to establish the facts on the ground before October’s election.

With international momentum growing for the designation of Israel’s conduct in Palestinian territories as genocide, Katz believes this land grab is yet another reason to support this argument. The 1948 UN convention, she argues, “defines genocide not only as killing members of a protected group but also as deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, in whole or in part, when accompanied by the requisite intent”.

Autocrats, elections and a new ‘Red Scare’

Nicaragua’s former revolutionary-turned-autocratic leader, Daniel Ortega, announced recently that he was planning to scrap elections. Ortega, who has spent 30 years in two stints in the presidential palace, said on July 21 there would be no more elections in Nicaragua to prevent the opposition from seizing power (the logic of which statement is hard to fault).

Ortega has since rowed back on this, saying on July 29 he wanted to extend terms limits to from six to seven years while barring members of the opposition seen by his government as “traitors” or “coup plotters” from running for office.

Felix Wiebrecht, an expert in authoritarian politics at the University of Liverpool notes, that while autocrats have a range of things they tend to do to ensure they stay in power – many, such as Vladimir Putin in Russia – consider elections to be useful in establishing legitimacy. Even if they are as clearly rigged as Russia’s last few have been.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has hit the campaign trail ahead of the US elections with a new warning to voters that America is threatened by an “enemy within”: communists. As historian David Bryden from King’s College London notes, it’s an old favourite of the political right.

Not just in the US, either. Bryden points to the rise of fascism in the early decades of the 20th century, which was largely fuelled by a widespread fear of communism. While clearly justified, as any historian of the Soviet Union will tell you, European fascist leaders used the tactic to target any section of society they hated or feared: in Germany’s case, the Jewish people, for example.

Bryden believes the US president is using the tactic to target immigrants and warns that anti-communist rhetoric is “powerful, persuasive and dangerous, and we need to take it seriously”.

Selling the World Cup

If you want to know why Fifa boss Gianni Infantino’s plan, revealed this week, to turn the World Cup into an investment vehicle is so unpopular, Josh Bland, who researches football culture at the University of Cambridge, is here to explain.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/31/diplomacy-after-death-at-senator-lindsey-grahams-funeral/