Joseph Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has resigned in protest over the US-Israeli war in Iran, becoming the first high-ranking official in President Donald Trump’s administration to step down over the conflict.
In a resignation letter addressed to Trump and dated effective immediately, Kent said he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” arguing that Tehran posed no imminent threat to the United States and that the conflict was driven by pressure from Israel and its allies in Washington.
Kent, a veteran deployed to combat 11 times, warned that the United States was being drawn into another costly and unnecessary war in the Middle East.
The outgoing counterterrorism chief said the narrative that Iran posed an immediate danger to the United States—and that a strike would lead to a swift victory—was misleading and echoed the justification for the Iraq war. “We cannot make this mistake again,” he wrote.
