Joseph Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Centre in the US, resigned on Tuesday. His resignation letter, inter alia, states, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation… It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby… Israel’s interests are not America’s, and its war with Iran should not be our war.”
Joe Kent, a former Green Beret with 11 operational tenures and ex-CIA, is an appointee of President Donald Trump and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Notably, Gabbard, who espoused anti-interventionism, hasn’t spoken about the Iran war publicly. Kent’s resignation comes hours after Trump repeated familiar claims that the recent US-Israeli military actions against Iran were to thwart the latter from acquiring nuclear weapons, arguing that this was essential for global security, as Iran is “a country that is sick…wanted to blow up the world,” and so on.
Kent’s warning about strategic misjudgement stemming from coerced and manufactured consent brings to the fore the stark questions surrounding the rationale for this war. After all, there is no evidence that Iran possesses nuclear weapons, and it has consistently and repeatedly denied that it is seeking them. Israel, on the other hand, maintains a policy of nuclear opacity but de facto possesses a nuclear “triad”, while the US, the EU, and other West Asian nations have largely looked away.
Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in July 1968 (then under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) and undertook never to seek nuclear weapons. In 2002, an Iranian opposition group alleged that Iran had secret underground nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak. Iran clarified that those were for provisioning civilian nuclear power, but the US and its allies rejected that explanation, arguing that an oil-and-gas-rich country did not require such facilities.
Eventually, Iran commenced negotiations and, in July 2015, signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with the US and others: An agreement to cap uranium enrichment at 3.67 per cent for 15 years (internationally monitored), a pledge not to develop weapons-grade nuclear material, and relief from sanctions. In May 2018, Trump exited the JCPOA. Iran remained engaged in talks, but in the absence of sanctions relief, eventually restarted select nuclear operations and began enriching some of its low-enriched uranium to 60 per cent (well above civilian requirements, though still below weapons-grade levels of around 90 per cent).
In March 2025, Gabbard testified that Iran is not currently building a nuclear weapon. On June 13, Israel attacked Iran. On June 18, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency stated there is “no proof of a systematic effort [by Iran] to move into a nuclear weapon.” Yet, a few days later, the US hit Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan with bunker-buster bombs.
Negotiations restarted, and in February 2026, Oman’s Foreign Minister confirmed that Iran agreed during indirect talks with the US never to stockpile enriched uranium, down-blend its existing stockpile of 60 per cent enriched uranium, and open its facilities to the IAEA. A day later, Israel and the US attacked Iran again.
On the other hand, Israel’s nuclear weapons programme dates back to the mid-1950s, when it purchased a research reactor and plutonium separation technology from France. Their Negev Nuclear Research Centre was disguised as a textile factory.
As per documents declassified by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, Israel is widely suspected by US intelligence to have diverted in the 1960s “between 100 kg and 330 kg of bomb-grade HEU” (highly enriched uranium) from the US’s Apollo plant of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. In April 1976, then-Attorney General Edward Levi stated that the Atomic Energy Commission had convinced the FBI not to open a criminal investigation into the HEU’s disappearance. And in September 1979, Israel conducted a nuclear test in the seas off South Africa, with no repercussions. Notably, a secret federal directive threatens disciplinary action against any US official who publicly acknowledges Israel’s nuclear weapons.
As per The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Israel currently possesses about 90 nuclear warheads, which can be delivered by fighter aircraft, land-based missiles (Jericho-series), and its German-HDW-origin Dolphin-class submarines. In contrast, Iran doesn’t possess nuclear weapons, even though Netanyahu has, for more than 30 years, claimed that Iran is “only months away” from developing them.
Kent, then, is the first major example of a senior Trump administration official publicly questioning the prevailing narrative that Iran posed an imminent threat while acknowledging that this is, essentially, Israel’s war.
The writer, a retired Army officer, was the principal director in the National Security Council Secretariat
