Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, perhaps the greatest Iran hawk in Congress, is already calling the United States military’s next shot.
Graham told Fox News’s Sunday Night in America that the Islamic Republic is already functionally destroyed following a joint bombardment by the U.S. and Israel over the weekend.
“The Iranian regime, the mother ship of international terrorism, is about to collapse,” Graham told the program. “The captain of the ship, the ayatollah, is stone-cold dead. All those people around him that helped him perpetuate this terrorism, they’re on the run or they’re dead. Finish the job.”
“Cuba’s next,” Graham said. “They’re going to fall. This communist dictatorship in Cuba, their days are numbered.”
Graham, who has advocated the obliteration of the ayatollah and his government for over a decade, was among the most enthusiastic voices in President Donald Trump’s ear leading up to Operation Epic Fury.
Despite not holding any official position with the White House ecosystem, Graham has positioned himself as a reliable ally for the president — particularly when it comes to foreign intervention.
His hype-man routine for Trump’s most aggressive foreign policy decisions was perfectly encapsulated aboard Air Force One in January, when the president was speaking to reporters about the then-recent kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
“Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump said — before Graham interjected from behind a doorway as if summoned by the mere mention of the communist island.
“You just wait for Cuba!” he enthusiastically said. “Cuba is a communist dictatorship that’s killed priests and nuns, they’ve preyed on their own people — their days are numbered.”
Cuban leaders know that Graham is not making empty threats. Economic woes and boiling geopolitical tensions between Cuba and the U.S. have put the regime on the defensive as it attempts to weather the Trump administration’s ire — praying that it does not transform into a hot conflict with the world superpower.
Cuba — a country riddled with poverty after decades of communism and international trade embargoes — once managed to scrape by through cooperation with anti-West allies such as Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and China.
Venezuela’s dictator was dragged from his home and brought to New York to face justice, with an impotent government left to be ordered about by the U.S. as Trump seeks to normalize its political situation.
Iran is now embroiled in a conflict that, as Graham stated in his interview, seems ultimately hopeless for its theocratic government to survive. Russia remains mired in the quagmire of its war with Ukraine, leaving China as Cuba’s sole reliable patron.
The aid they have provided — tens of thousands of tons of rice and access to alternative energy sources — has done little to offset the latest round of economic penalties rolled out by the White House to further isolate the communist state.
WITKOFF SAYS IRAN BOASTED IT HAD ENOUGH ENRICHED FUEL FOR 11 NUCLEAR WEAPONS
President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Monday told the highest government body in the nation, the Council of Ministers, that there is an “urgent” need to transform the island’s economy.
“We must focus immediately on implementing the most urgent and necessary transformations to the economic and social model,” he told the statesmen.
Reports emerged last month that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is communicating with Raul Castro, the ostensibly retired head of state who is believed to still wield considerable influence over national politics.
