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While four separate sets of radical Islamists planned and executed terrorist attacks on American soil this month, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center was apparently focused on other priorities. Joe Kent, who sprinted to Tucker Carlson‘s televised therapy session just one day after resigning from the Trump administration, claimed that the FBI blocked his investigation into who murdered Charlie Kirk. You would think that the FBI blocked the investigation because the mystery was already solved in the form of the forthcoming, slam-dunk prosecution of fanatical leftist Tyler Robinson. Rather, Kent insists that the case wasn’t closed, hinting that perhaps a certain foreign government killed the conservative firebrand because he had privately warned the president against Operation Midnight Hammer last summer.
“When one of President Trump‘s closest advisers, who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink, at least, our relationship with the Israelis, and then he’s suddenly publicly assassinated, and we’re not allowed to ask any question about that?” said Kent about Kirk. “We know the pressure, because of the text messages that have been made public, that Charlie was under a lot of pressure from a lot of pro-Israel donors.”
NO, ISRAEL ISN’T MAKING TRUMP BOMB IRAN
In a vacuum, these are the inconsequential and illogical musings of a madman. In tandem with his public resignation letter, they are a poisonous conspiracy theory that effectively charges Trump with treason.
Kent claimed he quit as NCC director over Operation Epic Fury, but rather than simply disagreeing with the decision to launch attacks on Iran, Kent called Trump’s entire motivation and agency into question.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” wrote Kent in his published broadside, accusing Israel of deploying an intentional disinformation campaign like the one “the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”
Never mind the fact that Israel lobbied the United States against its invasion of Iraq. The whole thesis of what Kent explicated here and implied during his interview with Carlson is that, whether by blackmailing Trump with kompromat or hoodwinking him in private, Israel managed to make the leader of the free world a mark because, in Kent’s telling, he was either too compromised or too stupid to resist.
This, of course, is belied by half a century’s worth of evidence. Trump first called upon the U.S. government to use military action against the Iranian regime in 1980, when Don Jr. was still in diapers. In 1987, Trump called on the country to seize Iranian oil fields, and the year after that, he’d specifically said he would “do a number on Kharg Island.” While in the heyday of reality television fame in 2011, Trump said he “would never take the military card off the table, and it’s possible that it will have to be used, because Iran cannot have nuclear weapons.” In the 11 years since he became the main character of American politics, Trump has been stalwart in his opposition to Barack Obama’s Iran deal and instead maintained that he would “never” allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.
The sky is blue, O.J. did it, Lee Harvey Oswald and Tyler Robinson worked alone, and Trump has wanted to bomb Iran since Melania Trump was still in Slovenian grade school. But the more interesting aside is not that Israel might have nudged us in the right direction, but that it is the rest of the Gulf Sunni world that needs us to see this war through.
We’ve already known for some time that Saudi Arabia privately lobbied Trump to go ahead with a war on Iran in February, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman working with, not against, the Israelis in the run-up to Operation Epic Fury. But while the rest of the Arab neighbors were initially recalcitrant, Iran’s response to the American-Israeli killshot against the ayatollah — namely, to attack the rest of the Gulf — has changed their tune.
In a blockbuster Wall Street Journal report, top members of the Gulf Cooperation Council come just short of calling for overt regime change.
“Any long-term political settlement must address the full spectrum of threats, including Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile capabilities, and their network of regional proxies,” said Sultan al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates’ minister of industry and advanced technology. The paper reports that another Gulf leader said that “the only acceptable outcome of the war would be an Iran so defanged and enfeebled that it could never imperil its neighbors again.”
Iran has only itself to blame. Whereas only Israel may have once wanted the full-scale collapse of the Iranian regime, Iran has united it with the GCC with its response to the Gulf, which publicly maintains defensive participation in the war.
It is true that Israel claimed unilateral responsibility for striking the South Pars oil field on Wednesday, damaging at least 12% of Iran’s total oil production and cutting off a crucial revenue source for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Though Trump publicly claimed the U.S. was not involved and denounced Israel’s decision, sources close to the administration say the U.S. did know about the strike in advance.
It is also true that before the South Pars strike, Iran had attacked the Ras Laffan LNG complex in Qatar, the Ras Tanura oil refinery in Saudi Arabia, the Ruwais refinery in Abu Dhabi, the Shah gas field in Abu Dhabi, the Bapco oil refinery in Bahrain, the Port of Fujairah in the UAE, and countless Saudi oil fields via hundreds of drones. Hence, War Secretary Pete Hegseth sounded predictably sanguine over Israel’s response, which might be better understood as a retaliatory response on behalf of the GCC than a rogue errand.
“We have objectives. Those objectives are clear. We have allies pursuing objectives as well,” said an unbothered Hegseth during a Thursday Pentagon briefing. “Iran has weaponized energy for decades. Israel clearly sent a warning.”
This reality is why Trump ended his denial of being read in on the South Pars attack with the conclusion that, actually, the U.S. will directly blow up the rest of the oil field should Iran continue to attack Qatar’s oil production.
“I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long term implications that it will have on the future of Iran, but if Qatar’s LNG is again attacked, I will not hesitate to do so,” wrote Trump on Truth Social.
Trump may have started this war with the support of Israel and Saudi Arabia, but it’s now the rest of the GCC that views finishing the job and eliminating the Iranian regime as existential to their survival.
As detailed in the last few weeks of Tiana’s Take in the magazine, America has remained remarkably insulated from the costs of this war, in large part due to Trump returning the nation to net exporter status for the first time since 1949. Israel’s highly diversified economy has similarly protected it from the explosion of global oil prices, which, as readers of the upcoming magazine issue will read, is disproportionately affecting Eastern Hemisphere markets while American oil remains steadily at or below $100 per barrel.
By contrast, Iran has made itself an existential threat to the GCC by targeting the energy sector. Despite MBS’s earnest attempts to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil dependence, the sector still supplies half of the kingdom’s GDP. Oil comprises nearly a third of the UAE’s economy, the majority of the economies of Kuwait and Qatar, a quarter of Bahrain’s, and about a third of Oman’s. Israel has survived the security threat of Iranian aggression for decades. But only now does the Gulf face economic assault from the mullahs.
WHY I’M NOT ‘PANICAN’ OVER OIL MARKETS
Now, going back to Kent’s grand conspiracy theory, ask yourself what is more likely. Did Israel spend decades targeting Trump in a disinformation campaign in the hopes that a real estate tycoon-cum-tabloid celebrity would become the president, or, as Jeffrey Epstein truthers like to tease, inveigle him in unnamed sex crimes to accrue kompromat to blackmail Trump into bombing Iran? Or, with the encouragement of the Saudis and backed by national intelligence none of us might ever see, did Trump finally fulfill the promise he and every other president have made for nearly 50 years in obliterating Iran’s ability to ever build a nuclear weapon again?
Kent’s whole departure may have been a defensive strategy to begin with. He was reportedly under investigation for leaking classified information before he quit, and he clearly coordinated his Carlson and company interview circuit before actually leaving the administration. But the Gulf won’t quit this war, even if Trump can afford to. It’s now the rest of the Sunni world that needs regime change more than the U.S. ever did.
