{"text":[[{"start":5.44,"text":"After his death last month, a video surfaced of US Senator Lindsey Graham cheering the bombing of Iran and his own part in it. Other Republicans had advised President Donald Trump against the war. But Graham knew his golf partner “loves blowing stuff up”. The recording was apparently made in March."}],[{"start":23.64,"text":"In August, Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. The US has lost face and Patriot missiles. Households have lost purchasing power as oil prices have risen. Even if the war had worked, a senator in his eighth decade might be expected to greet the use of lethal force with some regret and decorum."}],[{"start":41.6,"text":"Still, European liberals cannot recoil too much. Graham’s belligerence often came in useful. He was a friend of Ukraine in Washington. He was vigilant to the threat from Vladimir Putin when Germany was still building a gas pipeline to Russia and Mayfair was a recreational space for the Kremlin-connected rich. His last public act was a visit to Kyiv. A bill is going through Congress now that would grant extraordinary new tariff powers against Russia and its enablers. Graham introduced it. He was pro-Nato in a Republican movement that often wasn’t."}],[{"start":75.56,"text":"Are the two things — the Ukraine stalwart and the man who never met a war he didn’t like — separable? Could Europe have had the one without the other?"}],[{"start":83.84,"text":"If not, then Europe must prepare to experience this problem all over again in the coming years. Something of Graham lives on in Marco Rubio. The secretary of state’s aggression can be unnerving, what with his role in the Iran war, his side line as a kind of imperial proconsul in Venezuela, his pressure on the regime in Cuba with who knows what planning for the aftermath of its possible collapse. At the same time, this is the man who wanted to sanction Russia even before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a deterrent."}],[{"start":113.4,"text":"Rubio, as Graham did, personifies a dilemma for the continent. The Americans who are likeliest to agitate for reckless actions abroad are sometimes also the likeliest to defend democratic Europe. Both habits stem from a belief that America has a historical and almost celestial role to guard free societies. It is a dangerous belief and, for a continent in need of friends, a useful one. On that basis, Europe has to hope that Rubio rather than JD Vance or Tucker Carlson is the future of Republicanism."}],[{"start":145.16,"text":"In theory, of course, it is possible to have the best of both worlds: a selectively belligerent leader who picks only the right fights. But in the field of actually existing Republican candidates to succeed Trump, the choice is between Rubio and those who would sheathe the American blade even when the cause is just. (Or only when the cause is just, if we regard the war secretary Pete Hegseth as keen on the Iran intervention but reluctant to support Ukraine.) It should be obvious with whom Europe’s faint hope lies."}],[{"start":174.2,"text":"Let me anticipate the obvious counter-argument. Rubio is slipperier than a skinned eel. He voted against aid to Ukraine in 2024. Though he cited a reason — the bill did not come with extra border funding at home — the vote reeked of careerist desperation from someone who feared getting on the wrong side of Maga’s Russia apologists. Graham was a career-long war zealot. Rubio is not a career-long anything. Don’t bet Europe on a man who six months ago accused the continent of inviting “civilisational erasure” through immigration. (As ever in the Maga telling, western civilisation is supreme, but also so weak as to succumb to a few decades of liberal government. It is not for us to question how it can be both.)"}],[{"start":217.42,"text":"To this case against Rubio, there is but one answer: consider the alternatives. Vance’s animus for Europe, and specifically for underwriting its security, is much deeper and longer standing. Carlson has described himself as “more sympathetic to Putin” than to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. If by 2028 the Iran war is seen on the right as a clear mistake and a betrayal of America First, both of these men could enter the Republican primaries on an I-told-you-so platform."}],[{"start":245.72,"text":"On the balance of probabilities, a Democratic president would be better for Europe. But even that is less clear than it was. The leftward drift of the party might extend to a new scepticism of the “war machine”, a Democratic Socialists of America phrase that sounds worryingly open-ended. The left will argue that Joe Biden grew unpopular because he was seen as being preoccupied abroad as inflation surged at home."}],[{"start":270.88,"text":"Through a process of elimination, then, Europe is left with Rubio, certainly on the GOP side. When Graham died, he became the closest thing to a traditional George W Bush-era hawk in Trump’s orbit, and certainly the last one with a future."}],[{"start":287,"text":"As such, Europeans have no choice but to wish him well, even if it is through teeth so gritted that we have to get them capped afterwards. There were always two sides to America as a protector. It was indispensable, and it was reckless. In the now-romanticised era of US-Europe solidarity, when Nato was sacrosanct, the US fought wars in Vietnam, in which no European country participated, and Iraq, which split the continent. Those who live under one wing of the hawk can’t feign surprise when the other flaps around to disastrous effect from time to time. Europeans would find a President Vance dangerously prudent."}],[{"start":328.38,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1787184948_8105.mp3"}