Top U.S. counterterrorism official resigns over Iran war, says there was no imminent threat

March 17, 2026

WASHINGTON — Joe Kent, the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation on Tuesday, citing his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran and saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war.

“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,” Kent said in a statement posted on social media, making claims U.S. President Donald Trump has denied.



Kent, a former Green Beret and political candidate with connections to right-wing extremists, was confirmed last July on a 52-44 vote. As head of the National Counterterrorism Center, he was in charge of an agency tasked with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats.

His resignation demonstrates that the unease about the war within Trump’s base extends to at least one senior member of his Republican administration.

The leadership change at one of the nation’s top counterterrorism offices comes at a time of heightened concern about terrorism following recent attacks at a Michigan synagogue and a Virginia university.


Justification for Iran strikes at heart of resignation

Kent’s decision came down to the reasoning behind the strikes on Iran, he wrote in his resignation letter.

Trump has offered shifting reasons for the strikes and has pushed back on claims that Israel forced the U.S. to act. House Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested the White House believed Israel was determined to strike on its own, leaving the Republican president with a “very difficult decision.”

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said he always thought Kent was “weak on security” and if someone in his administration did not believe Iran was a threat, “we don’t want those people.”

“They’re not smart people, or they’re not savvy people,” Trump said. “Iran was a tremendous threat.”

A year ago, in nominating Kent, Trump praised him as a man who had “hunted down terrorists and criminals his entire adult life.”

A spokesperson for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard did not immediately respond to questions about Kent’s resignation or Gabbard’s views on the strikes.

Democrats strongly opposed Kent’s confirmation because of his past ties to far-right figures and conspiracy theories. But following his resignation, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Kent’s concerns about the war in Iran were justified.

“I strongly disagree with many of the positions he has espoused over the years, particularly those that risk politicizing our intelligence community,” Warner said. “But on this point, he is right: There was no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran that would justify rushing the United States into another war of choice in the Middle East.”

Johnson, though, pushed back on Kent’s claims at a press conference on Tuesday.

“I got all the briefings. We all understood that there was clearly an imminent threat that Iran was very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability and they were building missiles at a pace no one in the region could keep up with,” Johnson said.

Johnson said he is convinced that if Trump had waited “we would have mass casualties of Americans, service members and others, and our installation would have been dramatically damaged.”

Departure follows three recent acts of violence

In New York City, two men who federal authorities say were inspired by the Islamic State group took powerful homemade bombs to a far-right protest outside the mayoral mansion.

In Michigan, a naturalized citizen from Lebanon rammed his vehicle into a synagogue, where he was shot at by security before he fatally shot himself.

And in Virginia, a man previously imprisoned on a terrorism conviction opened fire in a university classroom. Officials said the attack ended when he was killed by students.

Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Kash Patel are scheduled to testify before lawmakers this week about threats facing the U.S., an annual hearing likely to be dominated this year by questions about the Iran war and the revelation that outdated intelligence likely led to the U.S. firing a missile that hit an elementary school in Iran and killed more than 165 people.

A veteran and former congresswoman from Hawaii, Gabbard has previously criticized talk of military strikes in Iran. Six years ago she said that “an all out war with Iran would make the wars that we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan look like a picnic. It will be far more costly in lives, American lives, and American taxpayer dollars -- and all towards accomplishing what goal? What objective?”

A popular figure among Trump supporters
Kent’s military background and his personal story of sacrifice made him a compelling figure among Trump supporters.

Before joining Trump’s administration, Kent ran two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in Washington state. As a Green Beret, he saw combat in 11 deployments before retiring to join the CIA. He also endured tragedy: His wife, a Navy cryptologist, was killed by a suicide bomber in 2019 in Syria, leaving him with two young sons. Kent, 45, has since remarried.

During the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Kent criticized what he said was a misguided desire for nation building by some in Washington, D.C.

“It speaks to our hubris,” Kent told reporters while campaigning for Congress. “For us not to have learned from all this just shows that there are people making money and making their careers at the other end of it. They’ve been doing it on the backs and dead bodies of U.S. soldiers.”

During his 2022 congressional campaign, Kent paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting work. He also worked closely with Joey Gibson, the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer, and attracted support from a variety of far-right figures.

Early during his first campaign, Kent acknowledged that a political consultant set up a call intended to broaden his social media reach that was joined by Nick Fuentes, a popular right-wing influencer who has said that Jews are holding the U.S. “hostage” and once proclaimed that “Hitler was awesome, Hitler was right.”

Kent later disavowed those ties and stated that he rejected all “racism and bigotry.”

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kent refused to distance himself from a conspiracy theory that federal agents instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, as well as false claims that Trump won the 2020 election over Democrat Joe Biden.

Republicans praised Kent’s counterterrorism qualifications, pointing to his military and intelligence experience.

Sen. Tom Cotton, the GOP chair of the Intelligence Committee, said in a floor speech that Kent had “dedicated his career to fighting terrorism and keeping Americans safe.”

The Explosion Inside Trump’s War Machine: Joe Kent Resigns

Mar 18, 2026


Joe Kent’s resignation is not an anomaly but an alarm: elite dissent is surfacing early because this war is built on deception.


Joe Kent’s resignation is shocking, but not for the obvious reason.


It is not shocking simply because it comes from within the Trump administration. Any administration of that size, stretching across thousands of officials, operatives and career personnel, will contain people who, despite the surrounding culture, still draw moral lines of their own.


Even an administration defined by blunt militarism, racialized rhetoric and an unapologetic embrace of force is not morally monolithic. There is always room, however narrow, for someone to say: enough.


What makes Kent’s resignation important is something else entirely: the language, the timing, and the political location from which it emerged.


When other officials resigned over Gaza, they established a standard of ethical clarity that still matters. Former UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber resigned on October 28, 2023, warning that “we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes” and describing Gaza as “a textbook case of genocide.”




Former State Department official Stacy Gilbert, who resigned in May 2024 over a government report on Israeli obstruction of aid, put it just as bluntly: “There is so clearly a right and wrong, and what is in that report is wrong.”


These were not carefully lawyered exits. They were moral positions.


Kent belongs in a different political universe than Mokhiber or Gilbert. That is precisely why his resignation carries such force.


He was not some liberal holdout inside a hawkish administration. He was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, confirmed in July 2025, a former Green Beret, a former CIA paramilitary officer, and by every normal measure a deeply embedded figure within the national security state.


He was also a Trump-aligned Republican whose confirmation battle was shaped by ties to far-right figures and conspiracy politics, according to AP. In other words, this was not an outsider recoiling from empire. This was a man from within that machinery saying he could no longer justify this war.

And he did not mince words.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote. “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.”


That sentence alone is politically explosive. It does not merely criticize tactics. It indicts the rationale of the war itself.

Then Kent went further.

“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” he wrote.

And then the bluntest line of all:

“This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”

This is not bureaucratic dissent. This is a direct accusation of manipulation, deception, and foreign-policy capture.

That is what makes this resignation different.

Officials often leave in silence. They retreat into euphemism. They invoke family reasons, timing, institutional fatigue, or the tired fiction of “policy differences.” Kent did none of that. He drew a line between right and wrong in the language of his own political tradition, and then crossed it. The significance of that act cannot be measured only by whether one agrees with his worldview. It must be measured by what it reveals: that the moral and strategic contradictions of this war are now so visible that even loyalists are beginning to break.

Kent also anchored his decision in personal history.

“As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

His wife, Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, was killed in Syria in 2019 as part of Operation Inherent Resolve. That does not sanctify Joe Kent’s politics, but it does explain the moral register of his letter. He was not speaking abstractly about sacrifice. He was speaking from inside its wreckage.

This matters for another reason.

We do not know what Kent knows and chose not to say. Someone in his position had access to intelligence, internal deliberations, threat assessments and strategic discussions that the public will never see in full. When such a figure concludes that there was “no imminent threat,” that judgment is not casual. It does not prove everything, but it gives weight to the suspicion that the public case for war was not merely weak, but manufactured.

There is also a wider lesson here, and it may be the most important one.
Unlike earlier US wars, this one is generating meaningful dissent with unusual speed. Iraq took time. Afghanistan took time. Even when elite opposition emerged, it often arrived only after the strategic disaster had fully matured. This time, less than three weeks into the US-Israeli war on Iran, anti-war protests are already visible, internal unease is already surfacing, and a senior counterterrorism chief has already resigned in public protest. That does not mean the war is near its end. It means the political architecture sustaining it is less stable than Washington wants to admit.

Kent’s resignation should also sharpen a debate that Washington has spent decades trying to blur: the role of Israel in shaping US foreign policy. Kent did not hide behind coded language. He called this war what he believes it is: a war launched “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Whether more officials will say the same remains to be seen. But one of them already has, and from a post that matters.

None of this requires romanticizing Joe Kent. One may object, strongly and rightly, to his past politics, to the role he played inside the national security establishment, and to the wider machinery of empire that made his career possible. But that is not the point. The point is that, within his own framework, he reached a conclusion and acted on it. He did the rare thing: he left power and named the corruption plainly.

This story is not ending. It is starting. Because once one insider says the war was built on lies, others are forced into a choice. They can continue to perform loyalty to a collapsing narrative, or they can speak. And the longer this war drags on, the more difficult silence will become.

https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-...n-inside-trumps-war-machine-joe-kent-resigns/

Top UK official judged Iran 'posed no nuclear threat' just before war began

17 March 2026

Jonathan Powell, the prime minister's national security adviser, attended the final talks between the US and Iran, which ended two days before the attack started, the Guardian reported on Tuesday.

Powell reportedly judged that Tehran's offer on its nuclear programme was "surprising" and that progress had been made.

He was attending the talks at Oman's ambassadorial residence in Cologny, Geneva, as an adviser, accompanied by an expert from the UK's Cabinet Office.

The Guardian reported that a former official briefed on the talks said the UK team "were surprised by what the Iranians put on the table".

"It was not a complete deal, but it was progress and was unlikely to be the Iranian’s final offer. The British team expected the next round of negotiations to go ahead on the basis of the progress in Geneva."

The UK came to believe there was no evidence that Iran was close to securing a nuclear weapon, or that there was an imminent threat of an Iranian missile attack on Europe.

Further talks were scheduled for Monday 2 March.

According to the Guardian, a diplomat of unspecified nationality said there was reason to believe the US was dragged into war.

"We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.” The source said.

UK-US relations strained

The new revelation comes as Prime Minister Keir Starmer seeks to avoid active involvement in a war that is opposed by most of the British public.

Britain has nevertheless become embroiled in the conflict to an extent, allowing the US to use British military bases for bombers en route to targeting Iranian missile sites.

Relations with the US have been strained over Downing Street's initial refusal, when the war began, to allow the Americans to use the joint UK-US base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to launch strikes on Iran.

Powell's presence in the talks could help explain Starmer's early decision, and why he remains opposed to taking Britain fully into the war.

Whitehall sources told Middle East Eye that the Starmer government believed the US-Israeli attack had no lawful basis and joining it would be against Britain's national interest.

Starmer said in an address from Downing Street on Monday morning that the Strait of Hormuz must be reopened to "ensure stability in the markets", adding "that is not a simple task".

This came after Trump threatened on Sunday night that Nato faced a "very bad" future if its member states failed to help America in opening up the crucial
waterway, through which a fifth of the world's oil passes - and which Iran has effectively shut in response to the US-Israeli war on the country.

Starmer said the UK was working with "all of our allies" on a "viable plan" to reopen Hormuz.

He added that the US-Israeli attack on Iran has "massively weakened" the military capability of the "abhorrent regime in Iran", but said there will need to be a "negotiated agreement" with the country to limit its ability to rebuild its nuclear programme and safeguard international shipping.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said on Sunday that the government is considering sending minesweeping drones rather than warships to Hormuz.

Minesweeping drones trick mines into detonating safely by flying in a pattern that makes them appear to be ships.

The Guardian reported that Downing Street did not respond to its request for comment.

Starmer said on Monday morning that his priority is to work to "de-escalate" the war.