A top Trump aide resigned over Iran. Liberals should stay away from him.

This morning, Joe Kent — the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — resigned in protest over the war in Iran. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war,” he said in a resignation letter addressed to Trump and published on X.

You’d think that a war critic like myself should welcome this development. The war in Iran is a catastrophic mistake, and it seems like a good thing that such a high-ranking national official is taking a stance against it. Indeed, plenty of prominent Trump critics and war opponents have praised Kent for these reasons.

“I didn’t support Kent’s nomination. Yet I’m glad he is willing to acknowledge the truth — there was NO imminent threat to the United States, and this war was a terrible idea,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X.

But the actual text of Kent’s resignation letter suggests a very different conclusion: that he is not taking an admirable antiwar stance, but laying the groundwork for an antisemitic conspiracy theory that could define the future of the GOP. 

Kent’s resignation should not be celebrated by principled critics of the Iran war, but rather serve as a cautionary tale for how a just cause could be hijacked by extremists to promote something awful.

Joe Kent’s thinly veiled antisemitism

In the letter, Kent lays responsibility for the war not at Trump’s feet, but Israel’s. In his telling, the president was helpless in the face of an Israeli “misinformation” campaign, an unwitting dupe for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to drag America into a war not in its interests.

“Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he writes.

There is some truth here: Netanyahu did indeed lobby Trump to go to war, as did pro-Israel members of the broader Republican coalition. The administration’s attempt to justify its dubious claims of an “imminent threat” from Iran by citing an impending attack on Israel also reinforced the perception that Israel forced America into war.

But Kent’s letter is carefully crafted to paint Trump as an empty vessel, a person with no beliefs or agency other than what the Israelis and their allies implant there. 

“High-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media…[served as] an echo chamber used to deceive you,” he writes to Trump. 

In fact, Trump has been hawkish on Iran for decades. Back in the 1980s, he called for troop deployments to the country and a US-led campaign to seize control over Iranian oil. In his first term, he tore up a nuclear deal designed to prevent war and assassinated a top Iranian military leader.

Moreover, Israeli leaders have lobbied every president in the 21st century to go to war in Iran; Trump is the only one who said yes. This suggests the key variable is less Israeli power over US foreign policy generally than the specific preference set and worldview of this president.

But Kent’s letter paints a picture of US foreign policy in the Middle East as being one giant Israeli conspiracy. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was, in his telling, not the result of US intelligence failures or post-9/11 rage or even neoconservative hubris; rather, he says, it was the result of an Israeli “lie” (what exactly that lie was is never explained).

Even more bizarrely, he describes the tragic death of his wife Shannon in a 2019 ISIS suicide bombing as part of “a war manufactured by Israel.” Shannon Kent was a Navy intelligence officer deployed to Syria under then-President Trump to support US operations against the Islamic State; it is unclear how the US mission to destroy ISIS, which Kent praises elsewhere in the letter, was in any way conducted at Israel’s behest.

The utter implausibility of these claims gives the game away. Kent is not merely expressing opposition to the Iran war or even the US-Israel alliance, but rather developing a broader conspiracy theory in which the true and just “America First” foreign policy was derailed by the nefarious influence of “Israel and its powerful American lobby,” aided by unspecified elements of “the media.” 

Trump and MAGA did not fail in Iran, in Kent’s view; they were betrayed by the same dark forces that have been corrupting American foreign policy for the entire 21st century. And given the corner of far-right politics Kent hails from, it should be fairly clear what religion those dark  forces represent.

How Kent’s arguments could define the future of the GOP

That Kent’s position veered into antisemitism is unsurprising.

In 2021, when he was running for Congress in Washington, Kent called the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes to get advice on social media strategy. In 2022, he did an interview with neo-Nazi blogger Greyson Arnold and hired a member of the Proud Boys as a campaign consultant.

Given these demonstrable ties to GOP’s rising antisemitic wing, it’s not surprising that Kent would see the Iran war in the way that he does. One of the leading voices in that camp — the podcaster Candace Owens — immediately clocked what Kent was doing, writing a post on X that turned the antisemitic subtext of his letter into text.

“May American troops take his lead and look into conscientious objection to Bibi’s Red Heifer War. Goyim stand down,” she tweeted, using a Hebrew word for non-Jews that antisemites have increasingly adopted as part of their lexicon.

This is not merely horrible social media chatter, but the earliest glimmers of an extremely dangerous development for the Republican party.

At present, Republican dissent over the Iran war is mostly limited to influencers like Owens and Tucker Carlson: polls show that roughly 85 percent of actual Republican voters are on board. This is largely a product of the base’s faith in Trump personally; it is vanishingly unlikely that MAGA voters will trust Kent over the president, and turn their back on a war he is leading.

But if this war continues to go poorly, public opinion will turn — much in the same way as many Republicans now view President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq as an obvious mistake.

In such a future, Republican voters will be looking for someone to tell them why their president led them astray. Kent’s letter is setting up an obvious scapegoat: the Jews.

You can imagine a future, after dozens of American soldiers are dead and an oil shock throws the economy into recession, in which right-wing figures like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson promote a narrative of Jewish perfidy with the “Kent letter” as proof — and find an audience in a party increasingly open to antisemitic views. “Stabbed in the back” narratives are a hallmark of fascist movements past, and this is how they tend to get started.

Kent’s letter, then, is not really a sign of rising Republican resistance to the Iran war that could augur its premature end. Rather, it is an opening salvo in a future political war over how the war’s (likely) failure should be interpreted — and an extremely ugly one at that.

War critics who do not want to legitimize antisemitic conspiracism need to see this for what it is — and distance themselves from it accordingly.