Joe Kent Reveals All in First Interview Since Resigning as Trump’s Counterterrorism Director

**Tucker Carlson** (0:00)
We want to start tonight with a clip from January of 2024 This is from this show, and this is Joe Kent, who later went on to become, until yesterday, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Here it is. What do you think the immediate and then longer term effects of a war with Iran would be on the United States?

**Joe Kent** (0:22)
Immediately, it would be very bloody. I have no doubt that we could probably defeat some of their air defense and go in there and have another shock and awe campaign, but again, we saw how the shock and awe campaign in Iraq really didn't actually work in the long run. I have no doubt that we'd have some immediate results that people would cheer about here in the United States. But Iran, Persia has always been an empire. It's been around longer than any of the other players in the modern Middle East right now, and they are not going anywhere. If we get deeply involved and deeply entangled with Iran, we are playing right into China's hands because China would like nothing more than for us to be committing our military industrial base to a war in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine, and then to be committing our conventional military power, our blood and our treasure, back in the Middle East. That will make the Pacific, our actual border, extremely vulnerable to Chinese aggression, or China will simply just watch us bleed out economically as we bleed out on the battlefield on these couple of different theaters. It's absolute insanity. It's opening up Pandora's box. And again, for what gain did the American people?

**Tucker Carlson** (1:29)
So the very first thing you notice about that clip, which was shot almost exactly a year before the current president was inaugurated, is that it was right. It was prescient. He called it. He called the general outline. Not that it was hard to call, but Joe Kent knows what he's talking about. He spent a lot of his life in that region. And he said a year before this current presidency began, this is a big, serious country. It's the oldest civilization in the region. And if we went to war with Iran, there would be a momentary sugar high. Americans would support it because they support their own country and they certainly support their military and people would approve of it. But very quickly, you could see a process by which we got caught there, trapped there, bear trap. Hard to extricate yourself from that. And sitting on the sidelines would be our chief global competitor, China, who would be silently nodding along with a slowly spreading grin knowing that they were the main beneficiary of what they were seeing, of our waste of American lives and treasure, as Joe Kent said. So we haven't reached that stage, thankfully. We're moving toward it and everyone who's watching carefully knows that. And if you're honest, you know that. So this is a very serious moment we're in and we're watching not just a war in Iran but potentially a total realignment of the world and the loss in some sense of what the United States has globally. This could be the beginning of the end of our influence in a lot of the world and that's just the beginning. So again, that's a big deal. It's starting to dawn on people and that leaves Joe Kent as one of the relatively few people connected to this administration who said it in public. Is that good or bad? Well, it may seem good. Of course, you want to be around people who have clarity about what's going to happen next. But in practical terms, it's bad. In fact, it's always bad. Whenever you have somebody who stands up and says, don't do this, here's what could happen, and then you do it anyway and it turns out that person was right. Your first instinct is not to apologize and correct your behavior. Your first instinct is to crush the person who called it correctly. And that's your instinct because, and it's the lowest of all instincts, but it's a human instinct, that's your instinct because his correct prediction is an indictment of you. Of course, and it's a way to deflect attacks on you and your own culpability by blaming the guy who told you it was going to happen before you did it. And this is a long-standing fact of human life. And in the last 60 years in this country, it has been the iron law of foreign policy, which is to say when things go wrong, the only people who get punished are the people who criticize the adventure in the first place. You can imagine General Westmoreland attacking Walter Cronkite of CBS News. And we think of Walter Cronkite, in my case, not much. But fundamentally, it was Walter Cronkite sitting very much on the sidelines saying, hey, this war is not going well. And there was General Westmoreland prosecuting the war. But General Westmoreland argued till the end of his life, in some way successfully, that he lost the war because Walter Cronkite criticized the war. Is that really true? How many troops did Walter Cronkite command? Was he in charge of strategy? Don't think so. He was a news reader in New York. But you can see why Westmoreland did that, why a lot of people believed it, agreed, agreed with Westmoreland. You saw the same thing happen in the days after the tragic and incredibly stupid Afghan withdrawal under Joe Biden. That didn't help the United States. Of course, we had to get out of Afghanistan, but the way we did it, who would argue that was a good thing? It was a terrible thing and resulted in the deaths of a lot of Americans. So, who was punished for that? As far as we can tell, and we've checked, only one person. And that would be Colonel Stu Scheller of the United States Marine Corps. What was his crime? Planning the withdrawal from Afghanistan? Oh no! No, Stu Scheller's crime was saying out loud, boy, that didn't work very well and why did we do this? And for that, he went to jail. The people who actually did it, who gave the orders or who carried them out without asking questions about them, which was everybody else, they're fine. You don't even know their names and they certainly haven't been penalized. So there is a long history, because this is a standing feature the way people are, that you criticize those who told the truth and who were right, who called it ahead of time. Now in a functioning society, you get a hold of yourself and you understand that people are like this, but if you want to be successful as a society, you have to restrain that impulse because it's low and it's counterproductive. And if you silence people who tell the truth, you end up making the same mistakes again and again and again. And maybe that's why we're here at this pivotal point in our war with Iran. So that's the first thing you notice. Joe Kent was right. Therefore, Joe Kent must be destroyed. And there is, of course, this ongoing effort to do that, to dismiss Joe Kent as a tool of the Islamists or a leaker or say he's married to someone who works for Hezbollah or lie after lie after lie. But they're all aimed at Joe Kent, the man, at his motives, at his character, his personality, at his wife. And that's by design because none of them touch on his reason for resigning as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, because if you focused on that, you would have to answer his questions. You'd have to answer, is this true? Is what Joe Kent, who possessed highest level intelligence clearances, who was really barred from knowing no secret in the US government since he was one of our top intelligence officials until yesterday? Seems like a pretty informed guy. Is what he's saying true? That's the last conversation anyone in Washington wants to have, so just attack him. And you're going to see a lot more of that. The people who said this war was a bad idea will be punished. And the more it turns out they were right, which is to say the worse this project goes, the more it becomes obviously kind of productive to American interests, the more vigorously they will be punished unto and including jails. Stu Scheller went to jail. Probably not the only one who will going forward. So you should just know that and understand what you're seeing in those terms. The second thing that comes immediately to mind when you watch Joe Kent from January of 2024 talk about what would happen if we went to war with Iran, is that what he said that day, a year before Donald Trump's inauguration, could have been said by Donald Trump, maybe with a different style. He was making Donald Trump's case, the case that Donald Trump has made for a very long time. Donald Trump, as everybody knows, became the Republican nominee in 2016, 10 years ago, in part because he was the only Republican running for president that year out of a field of nearly 20 people who was willing to say what everyone else knew, but was afraid to say, which is the Iraq War didn't help us. It hurt us. It was a dumb idea. And it went on way too long. And it became the quagmire that people like Donald Trump predicted it would be. And the American public so relieved to hear the truth about something they already knew, made him the Republican nominee despite maybe some concerns, but they did it because, hey, he was right. And he's the only one brave enough to say so. And Donald Trump made varieties of that case for the next 10 years and in many cases specifically about Iran, because Trump has seen long before most people in Washington, before almost anyone in Washington, the big picture, the outline, which is this is a contest between the United States in the West and China in the East, a rising power that matches or maybe exceeds our economic power globally, and we have to figure out how to apportion power. And we don't want to get sidetracked with engagements like, I don't know, another endless Middle Eastern war, because in the end, the only winner of that conflict is China, is China, in this specific case. Whoever in the end settles this conflict, whether it's the United States or some other power, whoever comes in at whatever the end of it is and says, enough, this is hurting the world, each side has made its point, but the global economy has a critical interest in the Persian Gulf, that's energy, and we're going to stop this now. Whoever that person is will become more powerful than ever, and everyone else will become less powerful. The person who settles disputes is in charge, not the person who starts them, not the person who wins them, the person who stops them. When dad comes home and stops the fighting between brother and sister, who's in charge? Dad, because he stopped the conflict. All of which is to say, if at the end of this conflict, it's China that comes in, China which has a vested interest in what happens in the region, since they're a major consumer of Gulf energy. If it's China that comes in and restores the energy flows out of the Persian Gulf and restore some version of peace, gets the fighting to stop, then China is in charge of the Persian Gulf. That's just a fact of nature. And so a lot is at stake as Joe Kent knew, as Donald Trump knew.