Joe Kent: why I resigned over Iran

A week ago, Joe Kent was the head of the National Counterterrorism Unit, a top intelligence official in the Trump administration. Now, he has resigned over the campaign in Iran and is not going quietly. He explains his decision and answers my challenge: is he overly obsessed with Israel?

What follows is the transcript of our conversation

Freddie Sayers: Let’s start by laying out the two camps as you see them within the Trump administration — the so-called hawks and the restrainers. Big picture, who are they and what do they think?

Joe Kent: It’s an interesting dichotomy. There are your traditional Republicans who have always viewed Iran as a problem that we have to solve — by toppling the regime, getting rid of the ayatollah, getting rid of the Revolutionary Guard. Then there are others who have said, ‘Hey, the idea of toppling foreign regimes, it may sound appealing, but it just hasn’t worked. We tried it in Iraq, we tried it in Syria, we tried Libya – throughout the Middle East, really – and we’ve never been successful at it. It’s always resulted in disasters that just tend to compound upon themselves.’ So we should work towards using the full scope of American power, through diplomacy, through our economic power, and when needed limited strikes that don’t get us involved in something that could be a prolonged conflict. And that’s where we find ourselves at right now.

FS: The story you have been telling in your resignation letter and since is that the decision to attack Iran was ultimately the result of the Israel lobby and their impact on the thinking of the president. By your account, how does that influence reach the president and affects his decisions?

JK: At the very beginning of the Trump administration, there was a problem that the Israelis had. That problem was that, basically, President Trump was in a great place to negotiate a deal with Iran that would have prevented conflict. And I say this because in the previous Trump administration, President Trump set up the playing field by killing Qassem Soleimani, but deliberately not getting us involved in a regime-change war in Iran. So he showed the Iranians that he would not take any grief from them. He would not allow them to push us around, as Obama and Bush had. He would take decisive action. But [at] the same time, he wasn’t going to take the trap of getting engaged in a never ending war.

President Trump drew a red line with Iran having a nuclear weapon. President Trump would always say, when he was a candidate in 2016, that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. Well, the former supreme leader [Ali Khamenei] agreed and said that Iran doesn’t want a nuclear weapon, and even issued a religious decree, a fatwa, back in 2004 saying that Iran can’t develop a nuclear weapon. The Iranians’ calculus was that if you start trying to develop a nuclear weapon, or you have a nuclear weapon, or you even just say you have a nuclear weapon, you’re going to get treated like Saddam Hussein. If you give up any ability to create a nuclear weapon, you’re going to get treated like Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. So the Iranians developed a very pragmatic strategy where they would have some enrichment, they would have the potential of eventually developing a nuclear weapon if they so choose, but they wouldn’t have a nuclear weapon, and they would have strict prohibitions on the nuclear program. That gave the Iranians and President Trump the ability to get to the negotiating table. And that actually was a threat to the Israelis.

A week ago, Joe Kent was the head of the National Counterterrorism Unit, a top intelligence official in the Trump administration. Now, he has resigned over the campaign in Iran and is not going quietly. He explains his decision and answers my challenge: is he overly obsessed with Israel?

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Freddie Sayers: Let’s start by laying out the two camps as you see them within the Trump administration — the so-called hawks and the restrainers. Big picture, who are they and what do they think?

Joe Kent: It’s an interesting dichotomy. There are your traditional Republicans who have always viewed Iran as a problem that we have to solve — by toppling the regime, getting rid of the ayatollah, getting rid of the Revolutionary Guard. Then there are others who have said, ‘Hey, the idea of toppling foreign regimes, it may sound appealing, but it just hasn’t worked. We tried it in Iraq, we tried it in Syria, we tried Libya – throughout the Middle East, really – and we’ve never been successful at it. It’s always resulted in disasters that just tend to compound upon themselves.’ So we should work towards using the full scope of American power, through diplomacy, through our economic power, and when needed limited strikes that don’t get us involved in something that could be a prolonged conflict. And that’s where we find ourselves at right now.

FS: The story you have been telling in your resignation letter and since is that the decision to attack Iran was ultimately the result of the Israel lobby and their impact on the thinking of the president. By your account, how does that influence reach the president and affects his decisions?

JK: At the very beginning of the Trump administration, there was a problem that the Israelis had. That problem was that, basically, President Trump was in a great place to negotiate a deal with Iran that would have prevented conflict. And I say this because in the previous Trump administration, President Trump set up the playing field by killing Qassem Soleimani, but deliberately not getting us involved in a regime-change war in Iran. So he showed the Iranians that he would not take any grief from them. He would not allow them to push us around, as Obama and Bush had. He would take decisive action. But [at] the same time, he wasn’t going to take the trap of getting engaged in a never ending war.

President Trump drew a red line with Iran having a nuclear weapon. President Trump would always say, when he was a candidate in 2016, that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. Well, the former supreme leader [Ali Khamenei] agreed and said that Iran doesn’t want a nuclear weapon, and even issued a religious decree, a fatwa, back in 2004 saying that Iran can’t develop a nuclear weapon. The Iranians’ calculus was that if you start trying to develop a nuclear weapon, or you have a nuclear weapon, or you even just say you have a nuclear weapon, you’re going to get treated like Saddam Hussein. If you give up any ability to create a nuclear weapon, you’re going to get treated like Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. So the Iranians developed a very pragmatic strategy where they would have some enrichment, they would have the potential of eventually developing a nuclear weapon if they so choose, but they wouldn’t have a nuclear weapon, and they would have strict prohibitions on the nuclear program. That gave the Iranians and President Trump the ability to get to the negotiating table. And that actually was a threat to the Israelis.

So at the beginning of the Trump administration, the Israelis came in, and they basically used official engagements with the Trump administration and their surrogates in the media to say that the American policy was: Iran can’t have any enrichment capability. And they said it consistently enough that they kind of willed it into being — we, in the US government, started repeating that the Iranians can’t have any enrichment, which short-circuited the ability to have negotiations.

FS: You seem to put almost all the emphasis on the power of the Israeli lobby. What about the power of the president to make his own executive decisions?

JK: At the end of the day, the president is the guy who makes the decisions. I don’t refute that. However, the advice that President Trump was getting was largely dominated by this ecosystem that I describe with Israeli officials. At the same time. on the news, echoing the same talking points, would be pro-Israeli media types — on Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, New York Post, etc. — saying basically the same things, almost in coordination with what the Israeli officials were saying, in particular about no enrichment, saying that enrichment equals Iran having a nuclear weapon, which couldn’t be further from the truth, but they basically short-circuited the negotiations by saying that.

Then, essentially, the Israelis put us in this position where they said an attack is going to be imminent, because the Israelis were going to attack Iran, and then Iran would retaliate against us. When you hear [the] secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the president, [the] speaker of the House, other administration officials describe the ‘imminent attack’ that was going to happen against America, it wasn’t an imminent attack because the Iranians were going to attack us. It was an imminent attack because the Israelis were going to attack Iran, and the Iranians were going to respond, which means we were letting the Israelis, who we essentially pay for the vast majority of their defense and offensive capabilities, we were going to let them drive the timeline towards a war with Iran, knowing that the Israelis have drastically different strategic objectives than we do. And then that’s why, for me, I said I have to actually go and publicly speak out about this and resign, because this is not a relationship we should have with a foreign country.

FS: How far do you think that campaign went? It’s one thing to say there’s an extremely effective lobbying campaign from Israel. I think most people would accept that. Do you also believe they were deliberately putting false information in front of the president as part of a campaign of disinformation? Do you believe that they were they were manufacturing lies in order to persuade the president to go to war?

JK: They convinced him that our policy was that Iran can’t have any enrichment. You hear people come in and say that if they have the ability to enrich, then they can rapidly develop a nuclear weapon, which flat out isn’t true. But also, even if it was true, we have data since 2004 that says the Iranians were enforcing internally a prohibition on developing a nuclear weapon. So it wasn’t necessarily a lie-lie, but it was an expansion of the truth, and it was making the president believe that his policy was you guys [the Iranians] can’t have any enrichment, to take any kind of negotiation off the off the table.

FS: It makes him sound very naive that he’s been so easily persuaded of something that you think is self-evidently not true. Surely there are lots of senior officials in the White House whose job it is to correct false ideas?

JK: There are. And in the lead-up to the 12-Day War, we had very robust discussions. We had very robust debates about what we thought would happen if we attacked Iran, if the Israelis attacked Iran, if we kept it to limited strikes like we did against the nuclear facilities. And there was a lot of us in the Intelligence Community and the diplomatic community who said, ‘A full-on war of Iran would be a disaster.’

FS: And during those ‘robust debates’ about the 12-Day War, you were on the side of, ‘Don’t do it’?

JK: I was, yeah. I was on the side of, ‘Look, we can’t let the Israelis drive our timeline.’ I didn’t want the president to be rushed into having to make a decision. So several of us said, ‘Look, we have to restrain the Israelis. We have to tell them that they can’t go on the offense, that we will defend them if they’re attacked, but if they go on the offense, it’s going to change our relationship, and we’re going to have to take away some of the aid that we give them, and we’re going to have to draw a hard line.’ The Israelis were very clear with us. They said that they think that this is prime time to take down the regime. The regime is an existential threat to them. So they were very upfront with what they wanted. And I thought we needed to come down pretty hard on them and just say, ‘Look, if you guys go on the offense, you’re not going to have our support. We’ll defend you if you’re attacked, but we need more time to make our decision.’

Also, I truly believe that Steve Witkoff was on the cusp, back in the May-June timeframe, of getting a deal with the Iranians. He’s a very good negotiator. He was communicating very effectively with members of the Iranian government. And I think there was a deal to be had there, because they were going back and forth on like, what level could enrichment be? How would this be supervised? They had agreed on no nuclear weapons. And so again, this was a threat to Israel’s strategic objectives. So we had these robust debates. The conclusion was the 12-Day War. President Trump got the fighting to stop in the 12-Day War. And then he concluded with saying, ‘We’ll take away Iran’s ability to enrich by conducting the strikes on the nuclear facilities.’

We knew that the Israelis would come back to us at the end of the 12-Day War and Operation Midnight Hammer. We knew they would, and when they did come back, that is when I saw, from my perspective, the robust debates kind of go away, and there was a much smaller group of advisers around President Trump. And again, it goes back to the official engagement from the Israelis then echoed by the pro-Israel media heads that were in Trump’s media diet.

FS: On that first robust debate that you’re telling us about, you made the case that they shouldn’t go ahead with the 12-Day War, and then the president went ahead anyway. Some people will be asking: why did you not resign then? If the president was doing something you felt was so wrong?

JK: At the time, I felt like it was my duty to fight from within, because we were having robust debates. When the president executes something that you don’t like, if you get your chance to say your piece, then your job as a presidential appointee is to salute, move out, and execute the president’s policy. I thought it was a decent idea to say that we could just conduct some limited strikes and then be done with them, but I knew that the Israelis would come back to us, and I was hoping that there would be a more robust debate in the second phase over whether or not this was going to happen, and that just failed to materialize. I gave it about two weeks of us trying to find off ramps during the Iran war, but I knew within about two weeks that we just weren’t being listened to. My personal conscience as a veteran, that if I ever had the ability to stop a war or speak out against a war, to make sure that the next generation didn’t have to go off and fight and die, that I would speak up. [T]hen, too, more broadly, and more importantly, I think, is to actually be able to talk to the president from the outside, through the media, to let him know that he has other options, and he can still reverse the situation.

FS: So do you think you’re having more impact now on the president, outside, than you were able to have inside?

JK: Remains to be seen. We’ll see what happens here in the next couple of weeks. I’m going to give it a shot.

FS: Were there similar levels of, as you call it, robust debate around the Venezuela action, and were you against that as well?

JK: So because that wasn’t a counterterrorism operation, I didn’t have much to do with that. So honestly, I can’t tell you if there was robust debate or not.

FS: Were you against it?

JK: It was a big gamble. So yeah, I mean, I in general, in terms of going after another regime, I think it’s not necessarily the best idea, although they obviously had a pretty well-laid plan, and so far, that has worked out pretty well. I don’t know if I necessarily had a very strong opinion on it at the time.

FS: It seems like possibly the apparent success of those earlier interventions, both Venezuela and the 12-Day War, seems to have given the confidence to the [resident that he can do these kind of things, because they were successfully remote controlled, clean interventions. You were among the people inside the administration, saying that they could go wrong, that new risks would be triggered, that it could lead to a wider conflict. But these things didn’t happen. Do you think Mr. Trump just thought, ‘Well, all these guys were warning me that it was going to become a mess but I got away with it both times. So I’m going to roll the dice again.’

JK: Absolutely. I think that factors for sure. And that was actually one of my big concerns coming out of Venezuela. It was an incredible operation. All credit to our intelligence agencies, all credit to the troops on the ground who made it happen. My concern was that now the general idea would be that if we didn’t like something that was taking place overseas, that we could just swoop in some commandos and take out the one guy. That’s a problem. I spent a career in special operations, and that actually kind of has been the downside of the effectiveness of special operations. That was a concern of mine coming out of Venezuela, that we would think that this military magic could carry over to something as complex and strategically of consequence as Iran.

FS: Some people might say that the Iran campaign is another example of that approach going rather well. He hasn’t yet put any boots on the ground. You’ve referred to it as a quagmire, but it’s not yet a quagmire. It is still mainly an aerial bombing campaign. Trump hasn’t — so far — been dragged into a full-scale ground war. Is there not a chance that he’ll get away with this one as well and stay remote?

JK: I don’t believe so. The consequences are so high for this one: world energy, […] the Straits of Hormuz, the impact that’s already having on the price at the pump, natural gas, the impact that’s going to have down the road with fertilizer, with the ability to feed large populations of the world. The stakes are just far higher.

Something that we’ve failed to do with this operation, that we did do at Midnight Hammer, and that we did do in Venezuela, is we haven’t clearly articulated what our strategic goal is. We haven’t said that our goal is to change the regime, because that never works. So we’re not really saying what our strategic goal is. We’re saying, ‘Hey, we want to destroy all their boats, all their ballistic missiles, the IRGC.’ But then we haven’t said, what comes next after that? Do we just go home and expect the Strait of Hormuz to open? It appears to me that we haven’t fully thought this out or articulated it.

I do think right now, while President Trump has a little bit of time, we have a window where he could restrain the Israelis, work with our Gulf partners, get back to the negotiating table with the Iranians, open up the Straits of Hormuz and prevent a quagmire or a disaster. I just think back to if we were a few months into our operations in Iraq, had we drastically changed course then and not made some of the mistakes that we made, how different the Middle East would be and how different the outcome could have been.

FS: So do you believe there is an off-ramp for the United States still, without it looking like a complete U-turn and surrender?

JK: I think it’s very easy for President Trump right now, using his sheer force of will and his character, his personality, to say, ‘We want to get back the negotiating table, and we want to open up world energy again.’ But the first thing he has to do in order to get the Straits of Hormuz to open and to change and to stop what’s going on right now, is he has to restrain the Israelis. If we don’t restrain the Israelis and tell them, ‘You can’t go on the offensive any more,’ and probably even take away a feature of their offense to make sure they only go on defense, then the Israelis will continue to escalate this, regardless of what we say to them, and even if they stop temporarily, they’ll come back a couple months and try it again, because the Israelis believe that this is their one opportunity to take down the entire regime. And the Israelis have a high tolerance for chaos. We do not, the Israelis do. So: restrain the Israelis.

And then I think you work through the Gulf, the [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries, you need to do what Trump has already started doing the last couple of days, lifting some of the sanctions on Iranian oil, so that it’s in the Iranians’ interest as well. It’s in their own national interest to keep the Straits of Hormuz open, so oil can flow. I think the move that he made to take sanctions off Iranian oil that’s already on the water, I think that was a very smart move. That’s the direction that we need to move in. But if, again, if we don’t restrain the Israelis, all bets are off. So I do think Trump can, in his own way, flip the table, which is a classic negotiating tactic that President Trump has used as a businessman and as a politician. He can flip the table, he can flip the script, and he can get us out of this. That’s actually what gives me some hope.

FS: Inevitably, people will be accusing you of anti-Semitism. I’d be keen to know where you consider the lines to be between being legitimately anxious about Israel’s influence on the US and a conspiratorial view of Jews or outsized paranoia about the Israel lobby’s influence in way that becomes anti-Semitic?

JK: I think Americans, or really any country, should be skeptical of any other country dictating what they’re doing with their policy. Right now, my issue with Israel isn’t necessarily what Israel is doing — it’s our reaction to it. When you have senior members of the government, the secretary of state, the president, coming out and saying, ‘We had to attack Iran because the Israelis were going to’ — that’s when you know the balance of power and the relationship is all wrong, especially considering how much we pay the Israelis for their own defense. So that’s the biggest issue I have, that the Israel lobby and the Israelis were able to influence us in such a way that we’re now in a situation that benefits Israel more than [it does] America.

Look, people are just going to throw out the anti-Semitism stuff, but I’m not even listening to it. I’m not paying attention to it. I’m not discussing the religion. Quite frankly, if the Israelis were all Christians, I would have the exact same thing to say about it. I just don’t think any country should have this much influence over another country — over our country, especially.

FS: Is it not right, though, that there is a special allegiance between the United States and Israel, and that swims through the Trump project just as much as the America First ideas? It is a concept of Western civilization, Judeo-Christian heritage, the idea that other civilizations are somehow a threat and the West needs to defend itself. And people in Trump’s world and people who voted for him, may well share some of your ideas about America First or prioritizing the homeland, but they also feel moved by the fact that Israel is a Western, successful, small country in amongst all of those Muslim countries, and they feel a special responsibility to defend it?

JK: I understand the sentiment, and the Israelis do a very good job of making a compelling case. I work a lot in the Middle East. As a Westerner, it’s very challenging to work in the Middle East. It’s a very different culture. The Israelis, in a way, because so many of them are dual citizens of European and American background, offer us this nice, easy button where they’re willing to kind of do a lot of the hard work, so that we become kind of complicit and then not realize that they are pursuing their own national interest that may diverge from ours. We have a lot of shared national interests. In the straight counterterrorism realm, we share a lot of the same priorities, and that’s fine. But it’s got to be a reciprocal relationship. We just can’t let that cultural familiarity that we may have with them blind our judgment and say, ‘Well, now if you guys want to go hit Iran, I guess we have to do it, too.’ That just doesn’t work out to the benefit of the American government.

FS: But would you be content to watch Israel lose in some kind of regional conflagration, because you would say that it’s not in America’s direct interest to defend that country? I mean, that’s the fear, isn’t it, that it’s a tiny country surrounded by hostile ones. Iran is committed to its destruction. Would you tolerate the defeat or even destruction of Israel on the grounds that it’s not in America’s interest to fight that war?

JK: No, we’ve always defended Israel. I’m not saying don’t defend Israel. I’m just saying: stop Israel from going on the offense to the point where we get attacked. If we’re saying an attack is imminent because Israel is going to attack Iran, not because Iran is going to wake up one day and decide to attack America, then the balance of power is off. I think it’s fine for us to provide defense for Israel if they are under attack. For instance, when they were attacked on Oct. 7, it was fine for us to go in there and provide them some aid and defend them. What’s not fine is for them to dictate what we do in terms of foreign policy.

FS: I listened to your discussion with Tucker Carlson a couple of days ago. Most of it was a very rational laying out of your main argument that America is too influenced by Israel. There was one section, though, that I felt was a little bit different in tone, which is when you were talking about the death of Charlie Kirk and the assassination attempt on the president in Butler. I want to ask you to elaborate on that. It felt, from what you were saying to Tucker, that you think that it is plausible or possible that Israel was involved in some way in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Did I get that wrong?

JK: No, I’m not saying Israel in terms of Charlie Kirk. I’m saying that there were foreign angles that we didn’t get to fully investigate that still need to be investigated. That was the role the National Counterterrorism Center.

What Tucker asked me, and I’ve had a lot of Trump supporters ask this question of me, is: do we think Trump really just got duped here? Trump was pretty clever and pretty smart when it came to foreign policy. He knew that this neoconservative stuff just didn’t work. He basically put the counter to neoconservative ideology on the map. So do we really think Trump was duped here? And I say: what I outlined in my letter about the ecosystem, what we’ve been discussing here, is the most likely explanation, but Trump being pressured into making these decisions I don’t think can be completely discounted.

There were two different assassination attempts against President Trump during the campaign. There were multiple breaches of security in the lead up to the to the 12-Day War. Charlie Kirk was one of the most vocal advocates against going to war with Iran. At the end of Midnight Hammer, we knew that the Israelis were going to come back and ask us to go to war again. Charlie Kirk again was vocal against us doing any more strikes or getting involved in any more operations against Iran. And then Charlie Kirk is having a blow-up that we found out about with his pro-Israel donors. Charlie is killed. We know there are people who had pre knowledge of that, because they posted about it on the internet. I know, from my vantage point, the National Counterterrorism Center, that there were foreign nexuses that we weren’t allowed to continue to investigate…

FS: Sorry, what does a “foreign nexus” mean in connection to the assassination of Charlie Kirk?

JK: A lead that could be of foreign origin. The FBI will investigate everything domestic. From the time they had the suspect’s name, and it was determined that he was an American, the FBI took lead on that. All the other leads from that very confusing day that had any potential of being foreign, the National Counterterrorism Center, my old office, would help investigate. And there was more work there to be done that we were not allowed to do.

FS: When you say you weren’t allowed to do it, who said you couldn’t do it? You’re the head of the counterterrorism unit, right? You’re the boss.

JK: Right, but we need the cooperation, because a lot of this intermixes with the FBI investigation. For a lot of that, we need the FBI and the DOJ’s cooperation.

Once Tyler Robinson was arrested, the vast majority of the investigation was handed over to Utah state authorities, and we were basically told, ‘We’re done here. There’s nothing else to investigate. We’ll let you know if we need your help.’ Meanwhile, we had leads that we needed to continue to run down. So we were blocked.

FS: But who has the power block you, as head of the Counterterrorism Unit? The Utah state police certainly don’t.

JK: No, but the DOJ and the FBI control the case files, so when it’s a domestic crime like what took place against Charlie, because it’s on American soil, the ownership of that will be under the FBI and the DOJ’s purview. Had it happened overseas, it would have been under our purview. And so they were the folks that we needed to go to for a lot of the data.

FS: So why do you think those people chose to block those lines of inquiry?

JK: I don’t know. I don’t know. I truly believe that most people in the administration want to get to the bottom of what happened to Charlie, but for whatever reason — reasons I don’t know — we were stopped from continuing to investigate. And when you take the totality of the assassination attempts, the breaches of President Trump’s security that have been made public, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, you can’t help but notice that there is a potential pattern here that that could — and I’m not saying this is happening, it is a potential — where President Trump, somewhere in the corner of his mind, does feel as if he is under some pressure. That there are powerful entities that that could do him or his family harm.

FS: It’s one thing if you mean that President Trump might personally be worried for his own security if he pursues a particular foreign-policy line, because there are loads of people out there who have a very strong view. That’s one thing. But if you believe that the Israeli state in some way was involved, or has somehow, through agents, made threats to the President that, to me, is a completely different order of allegation. Which is it?

JK: It’s incomplete. That’s what it is. There’s still a lot of questions that need to be answered about everything I just discussed about Charlie. There’s questions that need to be answered about Butler. There’s questions that need to be answered about the breaches in security. And look, I don’t think by any means it all points to like the State of Israel, but if you just take a look, there’s something there that we need to investigate more of, and people deserve answers to that.

FS: How do you feel your history plays in to your feelings about all this? You’ve had a long military career. You very tragically lost your wife during the war in Syria. Do you feel like, because of that history, you have a particular emotional investment?

JK: I think it gives me clarity. I have my experiences personally fighting on the front lines of the War on Terror, and I’ve also experienced loss from the War on Terror, not just through friends, but also losing my wife and having to raise our children alone after losing her. So I understand that the cost of war isn’t something that’s abstract. These aren’t just pawns on the battlefield for us to move around. These have real ramifications. So yes, this does give me a good deal of emotional investment, skin in the game. Somewhere on my second or third deployment to Iraq, I started to realize that we were kind of lied to, to get into Iraq. I was frustrated with guys like Colin Powell, who had fought in Vietnam yet who got us into this war under false pretenses. And I thought that they should have known better based on their experiences. And I said to myself, as a very young man, ‘If I stay in this game, and I ever have the ability to prevent other American young men and young women from going and dying on a foreign battlefield, I’ll speak out about it.’ And over the last couple of weeks that that resonated with me heavily, and that’s what led me to this point.

FS: In your resignation letter, you say ‘I lost my beloved wife in a war manufactured by Israel.’ That’s very strong language. Most people around the world feel like the Iraq War was mainly the conception of George W. Bush, more than ‘manufactured by Israel.’ I wonder, do you blame Israel for that tragedy?

JK: I blame Israel’s influence on American policymakers like George W. Bush. I mean, look, it wasn’t just Israel. It was the neoconservatives. But the Israeli lobby and Benjamin Netanyahu advocated heavily for the war in Iraq. The Israelis also advocated heavily for our intervention in Syria, because we had screwed up Iraq so bad by the time we were done with our conflict there, after eight years, we basically handed over Iraq to Iranian proxies who were working with Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which is a direct threat to the Israelis, as well. And so the Israelis encouraged us to engage in this dirty war that led to the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. So at the end of the day, when you reflect back on most of the major policy decisions that we have made in the Middle East, that the blame has to be laid solely on American policymakers who implemented the policy, but the common factor is the Israeli influence in the decisions that have been made in the Middle East, and that’s what we need to stop doing, and we need to start putting our own interests first.

FS: You’ve given us one scenario of what you see as a better outcome in this conflict, which is that Mr. Trump will decide to de-escalate, return to the negotiating table. I guess that must be the less likely option, now, although you hope it will happen. What do you think is the other option? If the campaign continues, what do you think happens next?

JK: My fear is that our current campaign to take out the ballistics, take out the Navy, take out the IRGC, it simply won’t be effective. Iran is a massive country. They have a very deep bench. And the more of their leaders that we kill off, I think the more galvanized the people are going to become. I think every leader that we kill off, the next leader who takes his place, is going to be even more radical and more galvanized than the one before them. So the Iranian will to fight is only going to intensify. We learned that lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places. So they will double down. And potentially, we will get to a point where we either are tempted to put boots on the ground, which will be catastrophic, or we will find ourselves in a situation where the Israelis will say, ‘We’ve got to go for broke. We have to do something drastic.’ If the Israelis can’t get a significant part of the populace to rise up, or they can’t get rid of the clerical regime that way, I do fear the Israelis could do something like escalate to using a nuclear weapon.

President Trump said that he wants a total surrender of the Iranian people. And the only time we’ve used language like that before was in World War II, where we either fought the Germans basically to the where they were beaten to the point of submission, or to where we used a nuclear weapon in Japan. So because Iran is just such a big country, and it’s hard country to get complete submission of, I do fear a drastic outcome if we continue to stay in this war — plus, we’re going to be on a tight timeline, because what’s taking place in the Straits of Hormuz, with the effect it’s having on the energy market, that’s going to have massive ramifications in Europe and America, gas prices, fertilizer production, etc. So we’re going to reach a point of crisis where we have to make a decisive, drastic action, and that’s where I fear a massive escalation of a ground force, or the Israelis doing something completely unpredictable, which they’ve done pretty much consistently up to this point, and using a nuclear weapon.

FS: And what happens domestically, in the US, in that scenario, if it doesn’t stop, and if it does escalate in the way you describe, what happens to the Trump project? What happens to the political project that you voted for multiple times and that you’ve been part of?

JK: I’m less worried about the politics. I’m worried about the catastrophe overseas, and I’m worried about what happens to our country. I’m worried about another generation going off and fighting and dying, in a quagmire war that my generation, the Global War on Terror veterans, we should have known better than to get our country in to at that point.

As for the Trump agenda, America First, whatever: I would say that we had failed to live up to what we ran on and what we promised to deliver to the American people. And that’s going to be a great shame, because there were a lot of great, solid ideas in the Trump administration and America First agenda that were already having a good impact on our country in the first Trump administration, and even in this administration, as well. So it will be a massive squandered opportunity to put our country on a new trajectory for a better future.

FS: Do you believe that if the president doesn’t change course, the whole political project is over? Do you think he will start losing his base of support? Do you think the next election looks less likely?

JK: Yeah. I mean, if you just look at energy prices alone, I mean, the effect that that’s going to have on the American economy, the world economy is already in a bad spot with inflation. If you add in an energy crisis because of what’s taking place in the Straits of Hormuz, that’s going to really harm people’s daily lives. We’re killing off the petrodollar. We’re killing off the confidence in our dollar system. We’ve already got the Chinese coming in and getting Iranian oil, and they’re settling those transactions in yuan, not the petrodollar. Our economy right now is built on us being the prime reserve currency holder, meaning everybody backs with their currency with the dollar, settles transactions in dollars. The longer this crisis goes on, the more confidence in that system erodes, and that’s going to take away our ability to run our economic system the way that we run it right now, with all of its faults. And I think it has a lot of faults. I think I don’t think us having a massive national debt is good for us, but having the dollar collapse, the world reserve currency, would be absolutely catastrophic for our nation.

All of this could happen rapidly. People could suffer massively throughout our country and throughout the world, and then at that point. I mean, the idea of America First, MAGA, would be dead in the water. I think that would be less consequential, honestly, than all the other effects would have on our nation.

FS: Joe Kent, thanks for talking to UnHerd.