Lindsey Graham, a ‘Hawk’ in the Republican Campaign

Having reached the age limit, Lindsey Graham announced on May 28 his departure from the U.S. Air Force Reserves, where he had obtained the rank of colonel. On June 1, the South Carolina senator declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the 2016 presidential election, counting on his years of service on the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee to set him apart from his rivals, who are generally novices in the area of diplomacy. During the campaign, Lindsey Graham will likely use the chaos in the Middle East and the Russian and Chinese challenges addressed to Washington, in Ukraine as well as in the Pacific waters, to assert his hawkish conception of American engagement.

Born in 1955 to a very modest family in South Carolina, Lindsey Graham divided his time between the military and a career in politics, leaving one for the other and accumulating electoral victories like military advances. A state senator in 1992, he was elected to the House of Representatives two years later, before entering the Senate in 2002, filling the seat abandoned by the great Southern segregationist figure Strom Thurmond.

Tactical Sense and a Free Spirit

In the Senate, the man who lost his parents at an early age found a mentor later in life in the form of John McCain, Vietnam War hero and inveterate Republican maverick. Lindsey Graham supported the Arizona senator during his 2008 presidential campaign against winner Barack Obama. There is no doubt that the current chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, omnipresent in the media, will return the favor in the coming months. It will be difficult, given the relative obscurity of the South Carolina senator, who is often locked in his area of expertise.

Like John McCain, Lindsey Graham possesses a tactical sense that he can combine with a certain freedom of spirit. He supported the two women proposed by Mr. Obama to occupy the open Supreme Court seats, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, in 2009 and 2010. But he also contributed to blocking the appointment of a woman close to the president, Susan Rice, to the post of secretary of state at the end of 2012, and he tortured his former peer Chuck Hagel, who became secretary of defense in 2013, after a grueling procedure.

Lindsey Graham’s willingness to occasionally compromise with Democrats, notably on the issue of immigration, regularly earns him the ire of the tea party, the right wing of the Republican Party. But the tea party was incapable of mounting an effective opposition during his second re-election in November, which he won by a landslide.