Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and the highest-ranking Trump-administration official to have resigned in protest of the Iran war, has told Responsible Statecraft that the United States cannot end the war “until Israel is taken out of the loop.”
Kent says the U.S. intelligence community, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s own testimony days before the June 2025 strikes, found no evidence Iran was building a nuclear weapon. He locates the war’s true engine in Israeli pressure: Prime Minister Netanyahu’s four trips to Washington between July and December 2025, documented in a New York Times reconstruction, paid off, and Israeli officials, in Kent’s telling, were explicit from January 2025 that their object was regime change, not nonproliferation.
After Operation Midnight Hammer, Kent said, “the circle shrunk down to just the president and a handful of advisers,” and once Operation Epic Fury began, “our ideas really weren’t even reaching the White House.” The strikes killed the Supreme Leader and National Security Council head Ali Larijani—the figures who had restrained the proxies and held the line against weaponization—and left Iran in the hands of the hardliners now governing it. “That was the Israeli strategy. It was very effective, and now we’re back in this situation.”
Kent’s account is increasingly hard to reconcile with the administration’s own slippages: Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s brief acknowledgement that the February 28 timing was driven by Israeli plans, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s admission that Iran lacks the capability to strike the United States, and President Trump’s own statement that the war was “at the behest of allies” in the Gulf.
New polling shows majority opposition to the war, with Republican support holding at only 22%—a figure Kent expects to decrease with every increase “at the pump.” The defeat of seven-term Representative Thomas Massie in his Kentucky primary this week, to an opponent backed by Trump and pro-Israel billionaires, suggests the political cost of dissent remains steep. Kent’s bet is that it is no longer insurmountable.