Iran mocked Trump and denied any talks, but he still told US TV channels that Iran “wants to make a deal badly”, and gave a timeline: “within five days or less”. After US President Donald Trump claimed to have held two days of talks with Iran, which he described as “productive”, his former counter-terror adviser Joseph ‘Joe’ Kent said the war would end only if US ally Israel is retrained first.“Step 1 in deescalation must be restraining the Israelis, otherwise all efforts to negotiate will follow this pattern: POTUS publicly announces deescalation. Israel takes major strikes to destroy the negotiations & in turn weaken our ability to negotiate. The war accelerates,” Joe Kent wrote on X.
He made another post in which he said, “President Trump is working to get peace with Iran, if he can make this happen it will be a very good thing for our nation & our allies in the Gulf. The Israelis will be against this, but POTUS is strong & can get them on board.” Israel has not immediately reacted to Trump’s claims, while Iran has denied any such talks were being held. Trump, however, doubled down on his claim after he announced that, owing to the “talks”, he was postponing by five days his threat to hit energy sites. Iran mocked him in turn, saying he’s “backed down”. Trump still told US TV channels that Iran “wants to make a deal badly”, and gave a timeline: “within five days or less”.
He even said he was talking to a “senior leader” but not the Iran Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father and predecessor was killed on the first of the US-Israeli attack in Tehran. As for Joe Kent, who quit as director of the US National Counterterrorism Center last Tuesday, he’d already said Israel forced the US into the war.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. 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,” he wrote in his letter to Trump.
“I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you 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,” he argued.
He added, “Early in this administration, 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. This echo chamber was used to deceive you 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. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.”
Joe Kent served in the US Army for 20 years. After retiring from the Army in 2018, he served as a paramilitary officer in the CIA’s Special Activities Center, and eventually entered public life. As a Republican, he ran for the US Congress too. In his letter, he also mentioned how, in 2019, his then wife, Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing while serving in Syria.
“It is her legacy and sprit, along with countless other men and women who we have lost in the war on terror that drives the mission at NCTC,” his profile on the government website noted. he is an Oregon native and a graduate of Norwich University in Strategic Defense Analysis. At present, he lives with his current wife Heather, who is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and their two sons.
