In the letter, Kent lays responsibility for the war not at Trump’s feet, but Israel’s. In his telling, the president was helpless in the face of an Israeli “misinformation” campaign, an unwitting dupe for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to drag America into a war not in its interests.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he writes.
There is some truth here: Netanyahu did indeed lobby Trump to go to war, as did pro-Israel members of the broader Republican coalition. The administration’s attempt to justify its dubious claims of an “imminent threat” from Iran by citing an impending attack on Israel also reinforced the perception that Israel forced America into war.
But Kent’s letter is carefully crafted to paint Trump as an empty vessel, a person with no beliefs or agency other than what the Israelis and their allies implant there.
“High-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media…[served as] an echo chamber used to deceive you,” he writes to Trump.
In fact, Trump has been hawkish on Iran for decades. Back in the 1980s, he called for troop deployments to the country and a US-led campaign to seize control over Iranian oil. In his first term, he tore up a nuclear deal designed to prevent war and assassinated a top Iranian military leader.
Moreover, Israeli leaders have lobbied every president in the 21st century to go to war in Iran; Trump is the only one who said yes. This suggests the key variable is less Israeli power over US foreign policy generally than the specific preference set and worldview of this president.
But Kent’s letter paints a picture of US foreign policy in the Middle East as being one giant Israeli conspiracy. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was, in his telling, not the result of US intelligence failures or post-9/11 rage or even neoconservative hubris; rather, he says, it was the result of an Israeli “lie” (what exactly that lie was is never explained).
Even more bizarrely, he describes the tragic death of his wife Shannon in a 2019 ISIS suicide bombing as part of “a war manufactured by Israel.” Shannon Kent was a Navy intelligence officer deployed to Syria under then-President Trump to support US operations against the Islamic State; it is unclear how the US mission to destroy ISIS, which Kent praises elsewhere in the letter, was in any way conducted at Israel’s behest.
The utter implausibility of these claims gives the game away. Kent is not merely expressing opposition to the Iran war or even the US-Israel alliance, but rather developing a broader conspiracy theory in which the true and just “America First” foreign policy was derailed by the nefarious influence of “Israel and its powerful American lobby,” aided by unspecified elements of “the media.”
Trump and MAGA did not fail in Iran, in Kent’s view; they were betrayed by the same dark forces that have been corrupting American foreign policy for the entire 21st century. And given the corner of far-right politics Kent hails from, it should be fairly clear what religion those dark forces represent.