The Dangerous Logic of the Joe Kent Letter
NEWS | 18 March 2026
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned today in protest of the Iran war, he blamed everyone except the person who launched it. In his resignation letter, addressed to President Trump, Kent portrays the president as a passive figure manipulated by others—“high-ranking Israeli officials” and “influential members of the American media”—rather than the most powerful person imposing his will upon the world. Again and again, Kent casts Trump, a two-term president, as someone swept up in events rather than driving them. “I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term,” Kent writes. “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 alleged shift, Kent claims, was due to an Israeli and media-driven “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform” and “was used to deceive you.” Setting aside its potentially anti-Semitic undertones, this argument fails on the facts. In reality, Trump telegraphed his bellicose intentions toward Iran for decades, and once in office, he escalated conflict with the country at every opportunity. In 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis, Trump agreed with a TV interviewer that “we should have gone in there with troops,” and said that doing so would make America “an oil-rich nation.” In 1987, The New York Times reported that Trump had told a New Hampshire audience that “the United States should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” In 1988, Trump told a Guardian interviewer that if he were a political leader, he’d be “harsh on Iran,” and declared: “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island,” the country’s oil-export hub. (The United States bombed Kharg Island last weekend, and a contingent of Marines is now heading to the region, potentially to occupy it.) “While everyone is waiting and prepared for us to attack Syria,” Trump tweeted in 2013, “maybe we should knock the hell out of Iran and their nuclear capabilities?” When Trump assumed the presidency in 2017, he quickly went to work putting his Iran impulses into action. He tore up the Obama administration’s nuclear deal in 2018 and assassinated Qassem Soleimani, a notorious leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in 2020. After returning to power in 2024, Trump picked up where he left off, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and finally this year launching the current war on the regime after directing the largest U.S. military buildup in the region since Iraq. Far from a deviation from Trumpism, the president’s Iran war is his ideology given final form. And Trump’s most fervent supporters seem to agree. A CNN average of recent polls found that 89 percent of MAGA Republicans approve of military action in Iran, compared with just 9 percent who disapprove. Kent conjured a vision of an anti-war president who never existed, while claiming to speak for an anti-war, “America First” base that is not in evidence, to blame external actors for an entirely predictable domestic political decision. It is hard to believe that Kent, a decorated former Green Beret, was genuinely unaware of all of this when he chose to serve the president. But long before he assumed his now-abandoned post, Kent gravitated toward conspiratorial explanations of events. He alleged that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen,” and that the FBI helped engineer the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol—and he stood by those claims in his Senate confirmation hearing. Kent has also been partial to anti-Jewish ideologues. In 2022, he primaried and defeated Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, before losing in the general election, but not before paying a member of the Proud Boys as a consultant. According to the Associated Press, Kent had “sought support from figures associated with the white nationalist ‘Groyper Army’ movement led by Nick Fuentes” during his campaign, then disavowed such an interest when the contacts became public. Kent later appeared at a fundraiser with a far-right commentator who had claimed that Hitler was a “complicated” and “misunderstood” figure, and whom the campaign also subsequently disavowed. Kent’s resignation letter reflects this worldview—and its fundamental flaws. In it, he blames Israel not just for somehow suborning Trump into war in Iran but also for being behind the Iraq War. The president, Kent writes, has fallen prey to “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” The historical record, however, suggests the opposite. “The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy—Iran is the enemy,” Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell and a vituperative Israel critic, told the anti-war reporter Gareth Porter in 2007. The Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal has recounted being told by then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002 that Washington was set on fighting “the wrong war.” (Trump, meanwhile, initially supported the Iraq invasion.) In his letter, Kent also blames Israel for the death of his first wife, a Navy cryptologist, writing that she was killed “in a war manufactured by Israel.” But Shannon Kent was not killed in Iran or Iraq. She was killed by the Islamic State in Syria during the Trump administration’s campaign against the group—which Kent praises elsewhere in the same letter. None of these claims makes much sense from a logical or factual perspective. But they are perfectly coherent as part of the long tradition of conspiratorial anti-Semitism, which blames groups of Jews for being behind the world’s problems. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery considered the most influential anti-Semitic work of all time, purports to record Jewish schemers plotting to profit by keeping the world in a state of perpetual war. The Hamas charter, which cites The Protocols, similarly blames Jews for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and World War II. Like Kent’s letter, these works do not represent reality but rather an attempt to impose an ideology on reality. They pin crimes on a preconceived perpetrator. This fallacy is precisely the reason that movements—and countries—overtaken by anti-Semitism inevitably unravel. Societies that adopt conspiratorial explanations for political, social, and economic problems lose the ability to rationally redress them. “Why did the stock market crash?” is a good question. So is “Why did the U.S. invade Iraq?” But a person who blames a financial meltdown on the Jews or spends their time chasing phantom Israeli culprits instead of a war’s actual American instigators will never understand the calamities in question and will fail to prevent future ones. Anti-Semitic explanations of events rob people of their agency and prevent them from acting effectively to improve their circumstances. Seen from this vantage point, Joe Kent is a cautionary tale. He advocated for and worked for a president who then launched a war that he ardently opposed, because he fundamentally misunderstood the world he lived in. Related: Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Today’s News Israel said that it killed Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official and a powerful regime insider, in an overnight strike. Iran has not officially confirmed or denied his death. President Trump said that he could “take” Cuba as the island experiences a nationwide blackout after its power grid collapsed amid a U.S. oil blockade. Cuba faces worsening fuel shortages and growing protests over repeated outages. Trump said that the U.S. can reopen the Strait of Hormuz without the help of allies after NATO members pushed back on his requests to help secure the waterway. Evening Read The author's grandmother Patricia Perry joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots in 1943. Courtesy of the Robinson/Cushing Family The Forgotten Female Pilots of World War II By Ellen Cushing Recently, I stood in an airfield in Sweetwater, Texas, and looked up. I was wondering what it would have been like to take off from there in a small plane, flying into the dust of West Texas and the chaos of World War II, as my grandmother had … During World War II, Sweetwater’s Avenger Field was the primary home of a program that trained women to fly military planes. They were called Women Airforce Service Pilots—WASPs—and they were the solution to a high-stakes problem: The war needed pilots, and men were dying quickly. From 1942 to 1944, these women volunteers engaged in just about every aspect of military flight operations except combat—ferrying aircraft, testing planes, transporting cargo, training new pilots—so that the men would be free to fight in Europe and the Pacific. More than 25,000 women applied to the program, fewer than 2,000 were accepted, and 1,074 completed training. By the time the program ended, the WASPs had risked—and in some cases given—their lives to save male pilots a cumulative 60 million miles of flying. 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Author: Yair Rosenberg.
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