This story originally appeared in Professor Glenn Diesen’s Substack on April 2, 2026. This shortened, edited version is shared here with permission.
Joe Kent is the former US Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned in March 2026 due to the war against Iran.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote in his letter of resignation to President Donald Trump. “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.”
I recently spoke with Kent about the mistake of attacking Iran and the intrusive influence of Israel over US foreign policy.
[Editor’s Note: The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and readability from the original full conversation, available here]
Joe Kent: As I said in my resignation letter, I believe that Iran posed no imminent threat to us; Iran was not on the cusp of attacking us. Since President Trump came back into office—and people with basic access to the internet can verify this—we watched the Iranians observe a very calculated escalation ladder.
They stopped their proxies from attacking us as they were attacking us under the Biden administration. When Trump came back into office, they sat at the negotiating table with us up until the 12-Day War and Operation Midnight Hammer. Now, mind you, during the 12-Day War, they didn’t attack us at all. Once we attacked them and hit their nuclear sites, they responded by firing an equal amount of missiles as we dropped bombs at a very empty quadrant on a base in Qatar. And then they immediately got back to the negotiating table with us.
The only imminent threat, as Secretary Rubio said, was from the Israelis.
The Israelis attacked Iran. And we knew that, during this iteration of the war, the Iranians would understand that this was an existential threat to their regime, that the goal would be regime change, and so they responded by retaliating against us. But, again, this whole series of events wouldn’t have taken place if the Israelis would not have attacked. There was no imminent threat.
I am also just against us getting involved in yet another regime-change war in the Middle East. I’m not a fan of the regime in Iran. I understand they are a terrorist threat, especially from my portfolio and my perspective as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. However, using a regime-change tactic that failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya—that, to me, was just a recipe for disaster. But it was exactly what the Israelis wanted.
And so, watching the Israelis really force the hand of my government was something I was not going to be a part of. I have a lot of personal reasons, too. My background of fighting in our wars in Iraq and Syria and Yemen and other places—I really did not want to see any more young Americans lose their lives in a needless war in the Middle East. And I just personally could not be a part of that any longer.
Glenn Diesen: It’s often pointed out that the Israeli and US interests, while they overlap, are also not exactly the same. Indeed, over time, at least over the past few years, we see that their interests appear to diverge more and more. Why is it that Israel has such a great influence over the decision-making in Washington now?
Joe Kent: Honestly, I think it’s a combination of things. The Israelis are very effective at what they do. They’re a small country, and so they use a very sophisticated, layered approach to influencing the American government. Obviously, their grip on Congress, I think, is well documented. They have very active political action committees that use Americans who support Israel to provide a bunch of money to different political candidates, and that gets them a certain degree of access.
We also have a very close relationship with the Israelis in terms of intelligence sharing, because the Middle East is a very challenging place to operate, and the Israelis are a very competent intelligence service. But because we rely on them for so much of our intelligence, I personally believe that we’ve gotten a little bit too close with them. Because of us not understanding a lot of what’s going on in the Middle East, we will take what they say, basically, as the only opinion worth counting in terms of intelligence collection.
But if you’ve worked in the region for quite a while, like I have, you do realize that the Israelis use their intelligence to influence us as well as to inform us. And they are usually pushing for a very different objective.
In this administration, for example, the Israelis did a very effective job of eliminating the potential for a negotiation between President Trump and the Iranians. Now, President Trump had always said that his policy was, “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” The Iranians in their own way agreed with that. The former Supreme Leader, before he was killed, had a fatwa or religious decree that prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. So Iran basically agreed: “We don’t want a nuclear weapon.”
Now, Iran wanted the ability to enrich uranium. They wanted the ability to produce a nuclear weapon, should they choose. So they basically didn’t want to go the route of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and say, “Hey, we give up everything,” which meant they would then be vulnerable to a regime-change war. And they didn’t want to go the route of Saddam Hussein and say, “Hey, we’re going to develop one,” or pretend that they may have had one. So their approach was pretty pragmatic.
The Israelis recognized this as a threat to their goal of regime change. Because what they saw was, “Hey, Trump’s going to get to the negotiating table with these guys. He’s going to get a deal because President Trump prides himself on being a dealmaker.” So what they sought to do was use their multi-layered influence network to move the red line from “no nuclear weapon” to “no enrichment.”
No American official in this administration said “no enrichment.” In the previous administration, Secretary Mike Pompeo had said that Iran can’t enrich, but he was really the only one who said that. When we came back in, in January of 2025, the Israelis used their official engagements, and then they also used their folks in the media—pro-Israel sympathizers in the media and in the think-tank sphere—to say, over and over again, “American policy is no enrichment,” or, “enrichment equals a bomb.”
And they did this through repetition. They would put it on the news the same night they’d be in the White House lobbying for these different things, or they’d be over at one of the intelligence agencies lobbying for these different things. And so, they were able to influence US policy and basically convince President Trump that his new policy was “no enrichment.”
And now we found ourselves in this quagmire where we bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, we take away their ability to enrich, but then the Israelis come right back—like you heard Mark Levin do on TV the other night—and say, “Well, there’s still some uranium there and we have to go in. It’s not enough to bomb it. We have to go physically get it, which means we have to put boots on the ground. We have to control the ground again.” It gets us stuck in this quagmire.
That, right there, is really what I call the “pro-Israel echo chamber.” It’s an ecosystem that they’ve developed throughout multiple levels of our government.
Glenn Diesen: My impression from Iran was that, if it was all an issue of having more transparency around the civilian nuclear program (ie., that they wouldn’t develop a weapon), that a deal could be made, and that their frustration often came from linking the nuclear issue to the issue of supporting regional allies or having certain limitations on ballistic missiles or drones. Do you see these efforts by Israel to link the nuclear issue to a lot of other issues as, essentially, an effort to make it impossible to get a deal, for the purpose of pushing war?
Joe Kent: Yes, the Israelis were very good at moving the red line. When President Trump scoped the negotiations very narrowly to “no nuclear weapons,” and then even in the uranium-enrichment sphere, there was some play before and even after the 12-Day War. Steve Witkoff is a very good negotiator as well. And he and the Iranians were in very real talks about what level of enrichment would be allowed and how it would be monitored—the typical back-and-forth that takes place in any healthy negotiations.
Then the Israelis would come in and say, “Oh, but, actually, it’s not the enrichment, it’s not the nukes, it’s the ballistic missiles. Don’t you realize these ballistic missiles can reach your bases?” Well, most of our bases were on Iran’s borders. That was kind of a no-brainer. And then they would say, “Well, it’s not those ballistic missiles, it’s their medium- and long-range ballistic missiles.” And then, “It’s their proxies, their support for the regional actors.”
I spent a lot of my career actually fighting Iranian proxies. But Iran showed that they could get those proxies under control, and they did that when Trump came back into office. They didn’t respect the Biden administration. They had attacked our troops in Iraq and Syria around 200 times since October 7th. But then, when Trump came back into office—because, in the first Trump administration, he had killed Qasem Soleimani—they said, “Okay, this is not someone to play with. Let’s get the proxies under control.” And they showed that they were able to do that.
So, again, we were in a healthy trade space for negotiation. And this idea that you hear frequently from American officials that Iran is just these psychopathic jihadis, like they’re members of ISIS or something, that we can’t negotiate with—I just don’t think any data supports that whatsoever. They showed that they would observe the escalatory ladder.
Look, I’m not a fan of the regime in Iran. I’m not a fan of the IRGC. I wish that the Iranian people would get rid of them. Unfortunately, we’ve set that goal back. I mean, there were protesters that were on the streets in January, protesting against the economic conditions in Iran. And I think that actually has more of a chance of getting rid of that regime than anything an external actor is going to do.
But, instead, we came in, and by trying to remove the regime forcefully, I think we only strengthened it. This was always our prediction. I think this speaks to human nature, but also just to the culture of the region and the culture of the Shias. So we worked really against our own stated purpose for being over there. And now we’re in this cycle of, “Are we trying to get the uranium? What’s our actual strategic goal?” Whereas the Israelis keep moving the ball forward, because their goal, really, is just to either get rid of the regime completely or have the regime in a chaotic war state where they can’t launch attacks against Israel.
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