Lindsey Graham Talks Like He’s the President: ‘I Am Willing To Make a Mutual Defense Agreement’ With Saudi Arabia

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) promised Saudi Arabia a “mutual defense agreement” against Iran in an appearance on Fox News Monday evening, a diplomatic activity not generally included in a senator’s job description.

Graham has loudly pushed for the U.S. to take a more aggressive approach to Iran for years, and has been a cheerleader for President Donald Trump’s recent military strikes there, jointly conducted with Israel. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in one of the strikes and another hit an elementary school, killing at least 175 people, mostly young girls who were students there. Trump has denied the U.S. was responsible but media reports have shown it was a Tomahawk missile that hit the school, a weapon that only the U.S. has, not Iran or Israel.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Graham traveled to Israel to secretly meet with Israeli intelligence and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, giving him strategic advice on how to convince Trump to join in the attacks on Iran.

Graham discussed the latest developments in the war with Iran with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday’s episode of Hannity, emphasizing his position that the U.S. was fighting “religious Nazis” and comparing the late Ayatollah and his son who had been tapped to succeed him to Adolf Hitler.

“People got Hitler wrong” by miscalculating how much harm he could do, said Graham, and were now being mislead about the regime in Iran.

Former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden were “fools” regarding Iran, Graham continued, and Trump “knew that they do not want peaceful nuclear power, they want a bomb to purify Islam, to destroy the state of Israel, and come after us.”

If Trump hadn’t acted, Graham declared, Iran was going to have nuclear capability “within weeks” and “if they had a weapon they would use it” — addressing anyone who did not believe that by saying “you are stupid, you are a fool.”

Graham issued a challenge to America’s allies to “join this fight,” calling out Spain for not letting the U.S. use its airbases and saying that he was “encouraging” Trump “to move all of our bases out of Spain” because they “will not let us use those planes to protect the world against a religious Nazi regime.”

Graham brought up his “friends in Saudi Arabia,” saying that he had been their “biggest champion”:

Here is what I wanna say to Saudi Arabia tonight: I am willing to make a mutual defense agreement with your country to give you protection in perpetuity. Under the agreement I have been pushing — and I hope we can continue to talk about — if you are attacked by Iran, we would go to war for you.

To Saudi Arabia, our embassy was hit in Riyadh, do you not have an obligation to join the fight with us? You have to do that — so if you do not believe the American embassy being attacked in Riyadh would trigger mutual self defense, maybe we shouldn’t do a treaty with you.

Later in the segment, Graham said spoke about the seventh of the U.S. service members who had died so far by saying that “the best you can do is finish the job he died for,” and said that those who had been killed were “protecting America.”

“I believe with all my heart and soul, if the regime in Iran still stands when this is over we have made a mistake,” Graham said, because “if they have a nuclear weapon they would use it.”

Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly reacted to a clip of Graham’s comments by asking, “When did Lindsey Graham become our president?”

“In the past 24 hours he’s threatened Lebanon, Cuba, the Saudis, the wider Arab region and now — checks notes — Spain,” she added.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

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