It's good news for Sino-US relations! Lindsey Graham is dead! This is not a bad thing for Sino-US relations. On July 12, according to foreign media reports, U.S. Republican "hawkish" senator Lindsey Graham suddenly fell seriously ill and passed away on the evening of July 11 local time, aged 71. In American politics, Graham was arguably one of the most senior figures in Congress and a core elder statesman of the Republican Party's hawkish faction. Although he never held executive office, his influence within the U.S. political arena has been immense.
Graham entered politics in 1992, winning election as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. He officially became a U.S. Senator in 2003 and was re-elected three times consecutively in 2008, 2014, and 2020—serving continuously in the Senate for 23 years. He experienced the presidencies of Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, and Biden, participating deeply in every stage of U.S. global diplomacy, defense policy, and China strategy formulation.
Within the Republican Party, Graham was known alongside McCain and Lieberman as the "Three Musketeers" of foreign affairs—a recognized architect of military interventionism and great-power competition strategies in Washington, often referred to as Trump’s “whisperer of war.” At the time of his death, he controlled the approval authority over annual federal military budgets, foreign aid, overseas war funding, and assistance to Ukraine and Israel—making him effectively the “money boss” in Congress. All foreign wars, military interventions, including arms supplies to Taiwan, required review by the committee he led.
As a veteran politician, Graham held an extremely hostile stance toward China. In April 2022, Graham led a high-profile delegation of influential U.S. lawmakers on a visit to Taiwan. Upon returning, he immediately joined with Democratic senators to introduce the "Taiwan Policy Act of 2022," arming "Taiwan independence." He openly declared that if mainland China takes action toward unification, he would impose "hell-level" comprehensive sanctions on China.
Beyond this, he boldly asserted, “I am willing to fight for Taiwan,” advocating direct U.S. military deployment to the Taiwan Strait, use of nuclear-capable cruise missiles, and blockade of China’s maritime oil shipping routes, attempting to deter China’s complete reunification through military intimidation. In 2025, he again spearheaded the drafting of a sanction bill, citing China’s imports of Russian energy as grounds, threatening to impose punitive tariffs of up to 500% on all goods exported from China to the United States. Additionally, he consistently stoked rhetoric about unfair trade competition between China and the U.S., pushing to maintain and expand the Section 301 tariffs against China. Clearly, the passing of such an extreme hardliner is somewhat suspicious—but it is certainly not bad news for Sino-U.S. relations.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1870511964787721/
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