INTERNACIONAL
Trump’s fiercest GOP critic became his most influential voice on war and peace
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In 2015, Sen. Lindsey Graham called Donald Trump a «jackass» and warned Republicans that nominating him would be a disaster. Trump responded by reading Graham’s personal cellphone number aloud during a campaign rally, encouraging supporters to call the South Carolina senator.
Few political rivalries seemed less likely to evolve into one of Washington’s most consequential foreign policy partnerships.
Trump rose to power promising to end America’s «endless wars» and challenging decades of Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. Graham, by contrast, remained throughout his three decades in public service an unabashed advocate of projecting American power abroad.
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Yet over the next decade, Graham became one of the few lawmakers with regular access to President Trump on questions of national security, emerging as one of the Republican Party’s most influential voices on Iran, Ukraine, Israel and NATO.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, speaks with reporters aboard Air Force One with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on the way back to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 4, 2026. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
He had built his Senate career around foreign policy. While many lawmakers spent weekends back home, Graham was often overseas meeting presidents, visiting war zones and trying to broker agreements between allies and the White House.
By the end of his career, his office had become an unofficial waypoint for foreign leaders trying to understand — or influence — the Trump administration.
In interviews following the senator’s sudden death Saturday, Trump described Graham as «like a member of the family» and said he was among the final people to speak with the South Carolina Republican after he returned from Ukraine just hours before his death.
As Trump reshaped Republican foreign policy around an «America First» agenda, Graham became one of the few congressional voices with regular access to the president on questions of war and peace. He frequently pressed Trump to maintain a muscular U.S. role abroad — even as the president questioned long-standing alliances and warned against prolonged military interventions.
Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham pose for a picture on a golf course June 28, 2025. (Sen. Lindsey Graham via X)
Rather than becoming another Republican hawk sidelined by Trump’s ascent, Graham cultivated one of the closest working relationships with the president, giving him unusual influence as the administration navigated conflicts from Ukraine and Iran to Israel and NATO.
Whether Graham simply reinforced Trump’s instincts — or helped shape them — may become one of the defining questions of his foreign policy legacy.
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«He would call me all the time,» Trump told Fox News Monday. «I’d say, ‘Stop calling me, Lindsey.’ It was amazing. He just never stopped. He was a worker — a total workaholic politician.»
Colleagues said Graham lived and breathed the work of the Senate, particularly serving as an informal envoy between the U.S. and allies around the world.
In the hours before his death, Graham told a confidant he wasn’t feeling well but joked he couldn’t die now because he still had work to do. He was preparing to push a long-stalled bipartisan Russia sanctions bill through the Senate, remained focused on advancing Saudi-Israel normalization and believed the Trump administration had not yet finished confronting Iran.
He had just completed his 10th trip to Ukraine, and maintained tight relationships not only with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy but also with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Gulf leaders and others around the world.
Graham believed that influence came from showing up, according to Jack Keane, a retired Army four-star general, the chairman of the Institute for the Study of War and Fox News Senior Strategic Analyst.
«He wasn’t interested in writing op-ed pieces or making speeches, he wanted firsthand contact with leaders of the world.» Keane, who counted Graham as a friend, told Fox News Digital. «He was interested in getting the results.»
Graham, upon being beaten by Trump in the 2016 primary, conceded that the then-real estate mogul understood the American public better than he did .
«He understood the American people better than we did, and shame on us for not doing it as effectively as him,» Graham said at the time, according to Keane.
So Graham went to work making himself useful for the president.
«Graham knew the world better than almost anyone in Washington, and he likely knew many foreign leaders better than President Trump’s own appointees,» Keane said. «He made a conscious decision to help the president by offering advice and counsel, which grew into both a personal and professional relationship.»
Graham’s worldview was shaped alongside late Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., with whom he traveled extensively overseas. The trio —known as the «Three Amigos» — championed an interventionist Republican foreign policy rooted in American military leadership, support for democratic allies and confronting authoritarian adversaries.
Graham publicly disagreed with Trump over Iran negotiations — preferring strikes and regime change — and repeatedly pushed for a tougher line against Russia in the war on Ukraine.
Those convictions at times put him closer to traditional Republican foreign policy than to Trump’s «America First» instincts, even as he worked to remain one of the president’s closest advisors.
Trump’s approach to foreign policy often shifted between military confrontation and diplomatic restraint. Graham’s rarely did.
Sen. Lindsey Graham is pictured in Kyiv on June 10, one day before his passing. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
Whenever Trump appeared to move toward a negotiated settlement with Iran, Graham followed a familiar playbook: remind the White House that Congress ultimately would have to review any lasting agreement.
After Trump announced a memorandum of understanding with Iran in June, Graham quickly argued that any lasting deal would require congressional scrutiny and even suggested Vice President JD Vance would ultimately have to defend it on Capitol Hill.
By the time of his death, Graham had fashioned exactly the role he wanted in Washington: trusted interlocutor between the White House, Congress and foreign leaders.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., described Graham as having a «kid-like exuberance about his job and the responsibilities he was given.»
«Even in his sixties he would get off a plane in a foreign land with a twinkle in his eye and look at me as if to say, can you believe we are actually here and doing this?» she wrote on X.
Very rarely in life do you get to be exactly where you want to be, when you want to be there, with who you want to be with, doing precisely what you want to do — that was every moment for Lindsey,» White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote on X.
«Lindsey was a senator’s senator. The job was everything to him. Truly did he believe in the splendor of the office and the noble lineage behind it, of which he was the worthy heir.»
Graham rarely seemed interested in winning an argument if it meant losing the president. He spent more than a year revising his long-stalled Russia sanctions legislation and negotiating with the White House as Trump pursued his own diplomatic outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Only days before his death did Graham announce that he had reached an agreement with the administration to move the bill forward.
While Trump frequently questioned the value of NATO and demanded allies shoulder more of the burden, Graham viewed America’s alliances as one of its greatest strategic advantages. He generally agreed that European nations needed to spend more on defense, but argued the alliance itself remained indispensable to deterring Russia and projecting American power.
Graham’s support for Israel was equally central to his worldview. He regarded Israel as America’s closest partner in the Middle East and spent years working to strengthen ties between Israel and Arab states, viewing Saudi-Israeli normalization as a historic opportunity to reshape the region while further isolating Iran.
Graham spent a decade proving that in Washington, proximity to power could matter as much as formal authority. Without Graham in Washington, Ukraine now fears it may have lost an indispensable advocate in Washington.
«Huge and absolutely unexpected loss,» said Oleksandr Merezhko, a lawmaker with Zelenskyy’s party, told the AP. «He was truly indispensable. I even don’t know who might be as important for us now in Trump’s entourage.»
«He was the closest link between Ukraine, our president and Trump,» he added. «Our position in Trump’s entourage might be weaker.»
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It’s unclear who will be able to usher Graham’s signature Russia sanctions bill through the Senate and onto the president’s desk with the same access to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
For now, the president will navigate wars in Ukraine and the Middle East without the friend who was never shy about telling him to hit harder.
lindsey graham, politics, foreign policy senate, donald trump, foreign policy
INTERNACIONAL
El ejército colombiano libera a 39 personas secuestradas por el ELN: hay soldados muertos y la transición se tensa
Is «Trade Over Aid» replacing USAID?
Fox News Digital gets exclusive access to the U.S. Mission’s «Trade Over Aid» forum in New York as Trump officials, including U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, push private investment over traditional foreign aid.
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EXCLUSIVE: The Trump administration is laying out its clearest blueprint yet for what comes after decades of traditional U.S. foreign aid, arguing that private investment, trade and American business — not taxpayer-funded assistance — should become America’s primary engine for development abroad.
At a U.S. Mission to the United Nations «Trade Over Aid» forum in New York Monday, Ambassador Mike Waltz, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview that the administration is «completely reforming how we do aid» by moving away from taxpayer-funded programs and toward private-sector-led development.
«For too many years, the United States and other countries have poured billions and billions of dollars into these aid programs and got very little in return,» Waltz said. «You go to these forums at the United Nations and at development agencies around the world, and you never find the private sector. You find NGOs and academics and governments, but you don’t find the creators of growth and the creators of jobs.»
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Ambassador Mike Waltz speaks at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations’ «Trade Over Aid» forum in New York, where Trump administration officials pitched private investment as a new engine of global development. July 14, 2026. (Donald Conahan/ U.S. mission to the U.N.)
Waltz said the new model is designed to «create jobs, to create business for American companies in line with America First,» while also raising living standards abroad and reducing instability that can fuel terrorism and poverty.
The administration moved to dismantle USAID in 2025, arguing the agency was inefficient and too often disconnected from U.S. foreign policy. Asked directly whether «Trade Over Aid» is replacing USAID, Waltz said USAID’s functions had been folded into the State Department as part of a broader efficiency effort, but insisted the initiative is about something larger than one agency.
«What we’re doing, this isn’t about USAID or what replaces it,» Waltz said. «That was an efficient effort to get our aid to serve our foreign policy, not the other way around. But what I think is more important is how do we help American businesses and how do (we) help create jobs around the world and reduce dependency.»
The stakes are immediate: with USAID reorganized under the State Department and aid budgets under pressure, the Trump administration is trying to show that it has a replacement model for how the U.S. helps poorer and fragile countries. The answer it is pitching is not more traditional aid, but more private capital, more trade, more deals for American companies and fewer open-ended taxpayer commitments.
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The forum brought together representatives from dozens of countries, U.N. agencies, international financial institutions and major private-sector players, including Microsoft, Google, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Walmart, Mastercard, Meta and others.
Czech Environment Minister Igor Cerveny, who attended the forum, said the idea resonated with his country’s own post-communist experience.
After communism, he said, the Czech Republic had to rebuild through work, business, industry and innovation rather than dependency.
Ambassador Dan Negrea addresses the U.S. Mission to the United Nations’ «Trade Over Aid» forum in New York, July 13, 2026. (Donald Conahan/ U.S. mission to the U.N.)
«If you work on your economy, on your industry, on your society, on nature as well, probably two, three, five years later, (you will) be in a better position,» Cerveny told Fox News Digital. «You have your own money. You are not now the slave of (asking). You are now the master of your destiny.»
Cerveny said trade gives countries an «opportunity to cooperate» rather than forcing them to return again and again with the same request: «Please give me some money.»
Ambassador Dan Negrea, who is spearheading the initiative in the U.S. Mission, told Fox News Digital that shrinking aid budgets around the world make a new model necessary.
«We need to think differently about how we help developing countries in an environment in which, in the United States, we are indebted and we cannot continue to spend money on helping other countries the way we used to,» Negrea said. «Development aid is going down not only in the U.S., but in countries around the world.»
Negrea said the initiative has received less resistance from developing countries than from traditional donor nations.
«Interestingly, there is less pushback from countries receiving aid than from some donor countries that like to continue in this attitude of charity, being magnanimous to other countries,» he told Fox News Digital. «For years and years and for decades, many developing countries are saying that they want to end this status of recipient of charity and move to a much more dignified relationship of partners and development.»
But some leaders from developing countries also warn that trade cannot replace aid overnight, especially in emergency settings. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation, and Francophonie, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, told Fox News Digital that aid remains critical in crises such as the Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC.
«Aid sometimes can transform dramatically a situation,» she said. «This is not something you can change overnight with trade. But yes, over a long term, trade is the pathway to create greater growth, greater economic prosperity, and therefore also more equal relationships between countries.»
Kayikwamba Wagner added that the shift must be «adapted to circumstances» and not be «too abrupt.»
The initiative already has drawn 46 countries, and launched a digital library with 63 capacity-building offers from private companies, governments, NGOs, philanthropies, academic institutions and international organizations.
But when pressed on what those offers have produced so far, Negrea acknowledged the initiative is still in its early stages. The library was inaugurated last week, he said, and the goal now is to turn offers into concrete outcomes.
«We want to see more deliverables,» Negrea said. «We want to see actual transactions that were done. We want to see countries using the digital library to see usable capacity building offers coming from around the world. So we want to help without the cost to the U.S. taxpayers, but at the same time creating opportunities for American companies.»
The central challenge facing the effort is whether private capital will go where aid has traditionally been most needed: fragile countries with weak institutions, unreliable infrastructure, corruption, conflict or markets too risky for major investors.
WALTZ CALLS U.N. A ‘CESSPOOL FOR ANTISEMITISM’ AS TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PUSHES MAJOR REFORMS
Ambassador Dan Negrea moderates a panel at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations’ «Trade Over Aid» forum in New York, joined by Czech Environment Minister Igor Cerveny and other participants. (Donald Conahan/ U.S. mission to the U.N.)
Waltz argued that is exactly where institutions such as the U.N. Development Program, the World Bank and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation can play a role.
«When we talk to organizations like J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and others, they’re saying, we want to invest hundreds of millions into these industries abroad, but they need better laws, they need better arbitration,» Waltz said. «We need to know that we can get our money out for our investors here in the United States.»
He said the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and U.S. contributions to the World Bank can provide «risk insurance and guarantees» for investments in riskier markets, including critical minerals projects needed by the U.S. technology sector.
«It is incredibly risky,» Waltz said. «Sometimes these capital providers like on Wall Street and in New York are only going to go to the safest place. Sometimes it makes sense, for example, as we’re looking for critical minerals for our tech industry, to go into risky places, but they need a little help.»
The strongest note of caution came not from critics outside the room, but from inside the forum itself.
Alexander De Croo, the former Belgian prime minister who now leads United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said trade and aid should not be treated as enemies.
«Trade is a destination, but development is how we get to that destination,» De Croo said. «Markets do not build themselves. They have to be built.»
De Croo said investment flows when rules are predictable, institutions are trusted and workers have the skills to seize opportunity. He described UNDP’s role as helping countries build those foundations. «There is no country over the past decades that has successfully developed without a strong private sector and without trade being a big part of that,» he said.
Christopher Sharrock, Microsoft’s vice president for United Nations and international organizations, also warned that aid still has a role that markets cannot fully replace.
«Aid does do an essential job and it does a job that possibly nothing else can do,» Sharrock said, pointing to vaccination campaigns, famine response and natural disasters as areas where assistance remains critical.
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Alexander De Croo, UNDP administrator and former Belgian prime minister, speaks at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations’ «Trade Over Aid» forum in New York, July 13, 2026. (Donald Conahan/ U.S. mission to the U.N.)
For the Trump administration, «Trade Over Aid» is being pitched as a more disciplined, America First answer to development: fewer handouts, more deals, less dependency, more jobs for American companies and foreign partners alike.
But the test will be whether it can deliver not only in countries already ready for investment, but in the hardest places — the places where aid has long filled the gap because markets would not.
united nations, aid, trade, world
INTERNACIONAL
Estados Unidos realizó operaciones diurnas contra Irán para evitar nuevos ataques a barcos comerciales en el estrecho de Ormuz
Estados Unidos completó el miércoles una nueva oleada de ataques contra Irán, informó el Comando Central de sus fuerzas armadas (CENTCOM), horas después de que Washington reimpusiera el bloqueo naval sobre los puertos iraníes en un marcado retorno a la guerra abierta entre ambos países.
CENTCOM señaló en la red social X que la ofensiva “degradó aún más la capacidad de Irán para atacar el tráfico comercial en el estrecho de Ormuz”. Durante una oleada de 90 minutos, las fuerzas estadounidenses “lanzaron municiones de precisión contra sistemas de defensa costera y sitios de almacenamiento y lanzamiento de misiles crucero” en la isla de Gran Tunb, agregó el comando militar junto a un video que muestra un bombardeo contra objetivos iraníes.
La ofensiva se suma a otra ronda de bombardeos llevada a cabo horas antes, cuando aviones de combate, drones y buques estadounidenses dispararon municiones de precisión durante una operación nocturna de siete horas contra decenas de objetivos militares iraníes. Uno de los ataques alcanzó un cuartel de la 388ª Brigada de Infantería Mecanizada del ejército iraní, en la provincia de Sistán y Baluchistán, matando al menos a siete soldados y dejando más de 260 heridos en todo el país, según funcionarios iraníes. Washington también reanudó los ataques diurnos, un movimiento inusual que evidencia el ritmo creciente de la escalada.
Estados Unidos había impuesto por primera vez el bloqueo en abril y lo levantó el mes pasado tras la firma de un acuerdo provisional que pausó los combates y abrió un plazo de 60 días para negociar temas como el programa nuclear iraní. Esas conversaciones se estancaron a medida que se intensificó la disputa por el estrecho de Ormuz, y el retorno del bloqueo esta semana marcó el colapso de facto de la tregua.
En respuesta, la Guardia Revolucionaria de Irán amenazó con detener todas las exportaciones energéticas de Oriente Medio. “La exportación de petróleo y gas de la región será o para todos o para nadie”, advirtió la fuerza paramilitar.
Irán, por su parte, se atribuyó ataques con misiles y drones contra Bahrein, Kuwait y Jordania, todos países que albergan fuerzas estadounidenses. Bahrein y Kuwait emitieron alertas por fuego entrante la madrugada del miércoles, mientras que Jordania informó haber derribado tres misiles iraníes.
El presidente estadounidense, Donald Trump, había anticipado el martes por la noche, en una entrevista con Fox News, que los ataques contra Irán continuarían en los próximos dos días y que puentes y plantas eléctricas podrían convertirse en próximos objetivos si no se reanudan las negociaciones. Estados Unidos ya había atacado al menos un puente.
“Más vale que lleguen a un acuerdo, o no les va a quedar nada”, dijo Trump.
El barril de crudo Brent, referencia internacional, cotizaba el miércoles por encima de los 85 dólares, más de 15% por encima del nivel previo a la guerra, aunque todavía lejos de los casi 120 dólares alcanzados en el punto más álgido del conflicto.
Trump había anunciado el lunes, junto con la reimposición del bloqueo, un arancel del 20% a los barcos que cruzaran el estrecho, pero abandonó luego ese plan citando pedidos de aliados del golfo Pérsico interesados en invertir miles de millones de dólares en Estados Unidos.
El estrecho de Ormuz, por el que en tiempos de paz circula una quinta parte del petróleo y el gas natural comercializados en el mundo, sigue siendo el epicentro del conflicto. Durante el acuerdo provisional, algunos barcos habían retomado el paso por una ruta cercana a Omán, supervisada por militares estadounidenses y fuera del control de Teherán, pero los ataques recíprocos de los últimos días volvieron a interrumpir ese tránsito.
Washington ha amenazado con reabrir el estrecho por la fuerza, aunque analistas sostienen que eso demandaría una armada mucho mayor y posiblemente decenas de miles de tropas terrestres. Mediadores regionales continúan intentando que Estados Unidos e Irán retomen las negociaciones.
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