A senior U.S. counterterrorism official resigned from his post on Tuesday to register his protest against the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, asserting that Tehran posed no imminent threat to Washington.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” read the resignation letter addressed to President Donald Trump by Joseph Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He is the first senior U.S. official to resign from the Trump administration over the war against Iran.
A former member of the Green Beret Special Forces who served multiple combat tours, Kent emphasized that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, adding “it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Directly addressing Trump, Kent maintained that until June 2025 the U.S. president had “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.” However, he continued, “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.”
According to Kent, this “echo chamber” had deceived Trump “into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory.” Emphasizing that this was a lie, he alleged Israel had used the “same tactic” to push the U.S. into the “disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”
The former counterterrorism official added he could not 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.”