“After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today,” Joe Kent wrote in a letter to President Trump that he posted to X on Tuesday. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Such a resignation amid armed conflict with Iran, after several Islamist terror attacks on U.S. soil, “is an unnerving development,” reflected National Review’s Noah Rothman, but the contents of the letter he wrote “should reassure trepidatious Americans that they’re better off without him.” When The Washington Stand searched for political figures defending Kent for this article, the only names that surfaced were former Fox News host turned anti-Zionist podcaster Tucker Carlson and avowed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

Kent’s letter generated the fiercest pushback over the claim that Iran posed no imminent threat to the U.S.

“I’m on the Gang of 8. I got all the briefings. We all understood that there was clearly an imminent threat, that Iran was very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability, and they were building missiles at a pace that no one in the region could keep up with … and we knew that their plan was to fire them upon Americans,” responded U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

“I don’t know where Joe Kent is getting his information, but he wasn’t in those briefings clearly,” Johnson added. “Had the president waited, I am personally convinced that we would have mass casualties of Americans, servicemembers and others, and our installations would have been dramatically damaged.”

In fact, Iranian diplomats recently boasted about that very fact in negotiations with their American counterparts. Two weeks ago, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff revealed that Iranian negotiators “said to us directly with no shame that they controlled 460 kilograms” enriched to 60%. “They were proud of it. They were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”

On this point, Kent’s conclusions were contradicted by none other than his past self. “Joe Kent testified before the Senate one year ago that Iran and its terror proxies threatened U.S. servicemembers in the Middle East,” recalled former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “He said it would be an honor to return to the fight against terrorism, and he pledged to lead with integrity and accountability. The virulent anti-Semitism of his resignation letter makes it clear that Mr. Kent is incapable of upholding these pledges.”

Historically speaking, “at no point since 1979 has the Islamic Republic of Iran not represented an imminent threat to the lives of U.S. civilians and service personnel, as well as American national interests across the globe. The Iranian threat is measured in degrees, not in its presence or absence,” wrote Rothman.

“For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America!’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries,” said President Trump in a short video message announcing the initial strikes. He continued:

“Among the regime’s very first acts was to back a violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days. In 1983, Iran’s proxies carried [out] the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel. In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on U.S.S. Cole. Many died. Iranian forces killed and maimed hundreds of American service members in Iraq. The regime’s proxies have continued to launch countless attacks against American forces stationed in the Middle East in recent years, as well as U.S. naval and commercial vessels in international shipping lanes.”

Yet Kent maintained that Israel has somehow tricked Trump into a fight that was none of America’s business. “Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” his letter alleged. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory.”

Rothman contradicted this narrative on two counts. First, he questioned the very existence of the “pro-war sentiments” Kent described, noting that most Americans remain skeptical of the conflict, a fact that has not escaped Trump’s notice. However, “the president acted on his repeated campaign trail insistence that Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon (or a ballistic missile shield around a nuclear bomb program) despite the absence of public consensus in favor of those operations.”

Second, Kent’s claim that Trump was hoodwinked into seeing “a clear path to a swift victory” overlooked Trump’s own early prediction that operations could last for at least four to five weeks but possibly “far longer.”

In other words, Kent’s narrative of a secret Jewish influence operation was constructed without reference to the available evidence, sounding more like an anti-Semitic conspiracy trope than a clear-eyed political assessment. Jewish groups were quick to recall Kent’s history of association with neo-Nazi commentators during a failed congressional campaign. Jewish Council for Public Affairs chief Amy Spitalnick warned that Kent was “an extremist with deep ties to Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers who never should have been in this role in the first place.’

As the letter continued, Kent only heaped more blame on Israel. The promise of swift victory, he said, “is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

Once again, the facts suggest otherwise. In 2002, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon lobbied the Bush administration not to invade Iraq, arguing even then that neutralizing Iran was a more important priority.

Gold Star widow Sharrell Shaw, whose husband was killed by an Iranian strike in Iraq in 2007, responded directly to Kent, “My husband didn’t die for Israel. He died because this war has been targeting Americans for decades. Long before most people ever started paying attention. We didn’t suddenly stumble into this because of Israel. Our service members have been in the crosshairs of Iranian-backed terror networks for years.”

Next, Kent blamed Israel for the long-running conflict in Syria. “As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel,” he said, “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

Kent’s first wife, Shannon, died in a January 2019 ISIS suicide bombing while deployed to Syria as a Navy cryptologist.

Ironically, Kent praised Trump in the letter for decisively defeating ISIS. “In your first administration, you understood better than any modern president how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” he wrote. “You demonstrated this by killing Qasam Solamani and by defeating ISIS.”

It took more than half of Trump’s first term before the final ISIS stronghold in Syria fell in March 2019. This two-year campaign involved some 7,000 U.S. military personnel across Iraq and Syria and resulted in a number of American casualties, including Kent’s wife.

The parallel is a strange one. According to Kent, Israel is responsible for “manufacturing” either the Syrian civil war or the rise of ISIS (he does not say which), leading to the death of numerous American servicemen and women, including his wife, yet Trump deserves credit for decisively ending that operation with U.S. boots on the ground, a little after two years in office.

According to his own logic, then, if Israel were responsible for “manufacturing” a war with Iran, Kent should be comfortable with numerous American casualties, a two-year timeline, and U.S. boots on the ground, if that is what it takes President Trump to win decisively and avoid a “forever war.” Instead, Kent pulled his parachute and ejected from the administration after less than three weeks and less than 20 American deaths. Even judged by its own standards, the only thing consistent about Kent’s letter is its hatred for Israel.

Continuing in the comfortable illusion that Trump’s foreign policy was hijacked by sinister Israeli propaganda, Kent argued that he remains a supporter of the president’s foreign policy. “I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term,” Kent told him. “Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.”

The subtext here is that Kent didn’t change; Trump must have changed. But it would be closer to the truth to say that Kent never understood President Trump’s stance toward Iran very well at all. Trump’s hawkish posture towards Iran dates back to 1980, when he called it “ridiculous” that President Jimmy Carter allowed the Iranian hostage crisis to continue and argued that Carter should have mobilized a major military operation to free them (a small-scale military operation failed due to equipment failure and an aircraft collision). Trump reiterated his willingness to use overwhelming military force against Iran in 1988 and 2011.

In recent weeks, it seems that Kent knew even less about Trump’s thinking on Iran because he wasn’t even invited to the meetings. An anonymous intelligence official told The Daily Wire that Kent wasn’t even part of planning Operation Epic Fury or privy to any of the briefings, confirming Johnson’s suggestion.

One possible reason for his exclusion may have been that Kent was suspected of leaking information. Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich, who departed the administration for the private sector in September, vented on X, “Joe Kent is a crazed egomaniac who was often at the center of national security leaks, while rarely (never?) producing any actual work. He spent all of his time working to subvert the chain of command and undermine the President of the United States. This isn’t some principled resignation — he just wanted to make a splash before getting canned. What a loser.”

Indeed, despite spirited disagreements and factions among the president’s top aides, Kent is the only security official appointed by Trump to his second administration who has publicly broken with the president over policy disagreements.

“The president said this yesterday, if you are on the team and you can’t help implement the decisions of his administration, he has the right to make those decisions, then it’s a good thing for you to resign,” said Vice President J.D. Vance, who is himself often more skeptical than Trump about the use of military force. “It’s fine to disagree, but once the president makes a decision, it’s up to everybody who serves in his administration to make it as successful as possible. That’s how I do my job, and I think that’s how everybody in the administration should do their job too.”

A surprising counter-example to Kent’s petulant resignation came from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who shares Kent’s skepticism about Middle Eastern wars (minus the anti-Semitism) and who found herself out in the cold during high-level meetings on President Trump’s Iran strikes last summer. Gabbard’s anti-war position is so well-established that her 2020 presidential campaign sold “No War with Iran” t-shirts. Despite a similar position to Kent, Gabbard chose to issue a statement not resigning in protest but rather endorsing President Trump’s right to make the decision.

“Donald Trump was overwhelmingly elected by the American people to be our President and Commander in Chief,” Gabbard wrote. “As our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country.”

Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. military has gone a long way towards neutralizing any threat from the Iranian regime. It remains to be seen whether the Iranian regime will have anyone left to claim the mantle of leadership by the end of March. At the risk of severe understatement, America’s war with Iran is certainly not lost yet.

But it appears that Joe Kent and like-minded skeptics of American power overseas would like it to be. “I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for,” Kent concluded his resignation letter to Trump. “The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.”

Now is the time for bold action, and President Trump has chosen to take that bold action by knocking out the world’s foremost sponsor of anti-American terrorism. To lose heart and turn back with the job half done will only embolden the Iranian regime and America’s other adversaries with good reason to believe that America never has the will to follow through on a victory.

Patriots understand this, but some would-be patriots are so blinded by anti-Semitic hatred that their wish to put the Jews last overcomes their wish to put America First.

“None of [his letter] is especially persuasive — that is, unless you don’t need any persuading to assume the worst of Israel and its American puppets,” Rothman concluded. “The letter is so clearly influenced by addled thinking informed by anti-Israel biases that it’s reasonable to conclude that Americans are better off without Joe Kent as the nation’s anti-terrorism czar.”