We're Going to Make a Tonne of Money

Some politicians dress up war in the language of freedom. Lindsey Graham didn't bother.

"When this regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going to make a tonne of money," the veteran Republican senator told Fox News on Sunday. Then, near the end of the same interview, he held up a hat and previewed the next target: Cuba.

The candor was striking. And the implications deserve more than a news cycle.

What Happened — and How We Got Here

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military strike on Iran. The Trump administration justified the attack by citing an imminent Iranian threat — a claim that international law experts widely dismissed as legally unfounded.

Within days, the consequences were cascading. Iranian retaliatory strikes hit US military bases and critical infrastructure across Gulf states including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Airspace across GCC countries was shut down. Oil tankers were stranded. Global crude prices broke $100 a barrel.

Graham, appearing on Fox News, announced that the attacks would escalate further over the coming two weeks. "Nobody will threaten us in the Strait of Hormuz again," he said. He also called on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to join the fight directly — a significant ask, given that both countries were already absorbing Iranian retaliatory strikes.

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei was direct in his response: "Their design is clear — they aim at partitioning our country to take illegal possession of our oil riches."

The Senator Who Coached the War

Graham's role wasn't limited to cheerleading after the fact. In the weeks before the strikes, he made multiple trips to Israel, meeting with Mossad officials. "They'll tell me things our own government won't tell me," he said.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Graham also met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby President Trump for military action. Netanyahu then presented Trump with intelligence that, Graham says, "persuaded" him to authorize the joint attack.

This is a remarkable account — a sitting US senator, acting as an informal back-channel between a foreign government and the White House, helping to architect a war. Whether that's statesmanship or something more troubling depends heavily on who you ask.

Israel has long argued that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an existential threat. But the International Atomic Energy Agency has consistently stated there is no evidence of a systematic, ongoing Iranian program to produce nuclear weapons. Iran maintains its nuclear activities are for civilian purposes.

The diplomatic alternative — the 2015 nuclear deal brokered under President Obama — had placed verifiable limits on Iran's program in exchange for sanctions relief. Netanyahu opposed it. Trump withdrew from it in 2018. That decision foreclosed the diplomatic path and set the conditions for where we are today.

The Resource Logic — and Why It Matters

Graham's Fox News remarks connected two seemingly separate events: the US apprehension of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the attack on Iran. His framing was explicit.

"Venezuela and Iran have 31 percent of the world's oil reserves. We're going to have a partnership with 31 percent of the known reserves. This is China's nightmare. This is a good investment."

This is not a new theory of American foreign policy — it's an old one, stated unusually plainly. For decades, critics of US interventionism have argued that resource interests underlie military decisions dressed up in the language of democracy and security. Graham's remarks don't prove that thesis, but they do make it harder to dismiss.

The China dimension is also significant. Beijing is Iran's largest oil customer. If the US gains effective control over Iranian oil flows — through regime change or a compliant successor government — it would represent a direct blow to Chinese energy security. That's not incidental to the strategy; by Graham's own account, it's the point.

A Track Record Worth Examining

Graham has been one of the most consistent advocates for US military intervention in the Middle East over the past two decades. He supported the 2003 Iraq War, which killed more than 270,000 Iraqi civilians, destabilized the region, and contributed to the rise of al-Qaeda and ISIL. He backed interventions in Libya, which remains divided between competing factions, and in Syria, where more than 300,000 people died and roughly half the population was displaced.

None of those interventions produced the stable, prosperous outcomes their architects promised. That doesn't mean the Iran campaign will follow the same trajectory — but it does raise a question worth sitting with: what's different this time?

Iran is a country of 85 million people, with a far more complex political landscape than Iraq in 2003. Regime collapse doesn't automatically produce a pro-American government. The forces that might fill a post-regime vacuum are not necessarily aligned with Washington's interests — or anyone's vision of stability.

Who's Watching — and What They See

The war looks different depending on where you're standing.

For the Trump administration and its supporters, this is decisive action against a regime that has funded proxy militias across the region, threatened Israel's existence, and pursued nuclear ambitions. The argument is that diplomacy failed and deterrence required force.

For Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the picture is more complicated. They've spent decades buying American weapons and hosting US bases precisely to deter Iran — but now they're absorbing direct Iranian missile strikes as a consequence of a war they didn't start. Graham's call for them to "get into the fight" puts them in an uncomfortable position.

For China, this is a direct challenge to energy security and a demonstration that the US is willing to use military force to reshape resource access. Beijing will be recalibrating.

For much of the Global South, Graham's "good investment" framing will read as confirmation of a long-held suspicion: that US military interventions are ultimately about resources, not values.

And for ordinary Iranians — many of whom have long opposed the clerical regime — the prospect of US-backed regime change carries a complicated history. The last time Washington helped topple an Iranian government, in 1953, it installed a shah whose authoritarian rule eventually produced the very revolution the US has spent decades trying to reverse.