18/03/2026
Joe Kent, the man in charge of America’s National Counterterrorism Center and one of Donald Trump’s top intelligence officials, has just resigned in protest over the Iran war.
In a public resignation letter, posted on his official X account, Kent says he “cannot in good conscience” support the ongoing war and claims Iran “posed no imminent threat” to the United States. That phrase “imminent threat” is crucial, because it’s the legal language presidents often rely on to launch military action without Congress and to justify strikes under international law.
Kent goes even further, accusing Trump of being pushed into this conflict “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” and comparing it to how, in his view, Israel helped drag the U.S. into the disastrous Iraq war.
A veteran with 11 combat deployments and a Gold Star husband whose wife Shannon was killed in a 2019 bombing in Syria, he says he refuses to send “the next generation” to die in a war that, he argues, serves no real benefit to the American people.
His resignation is the highest-profile break so far from inside Trump’s own national security team since the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran on February 28. It signals that doubts about the war’s true rationale are not just coming from Democrats or anti-war activists, but from inside Trump’s base and from the very official who was supposed to assess terrorist threats for the administration.
In his parting message, Kent urges Trump to “reverse course” and warns that the U.S. is at a crossroads: either step back from another Middle East war, or slide deeper into “decline and chaos.”
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