Joe Kent’s resignation as a top US counterterrorism official over President Trump’s war on Iran has been a godsend for far-right antisemitic conspiracy theorists. MAGA figures like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes have used Kent’s exit to back their claims that Trump is a puppet, acting out the war on behalf of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and other Jewish officials. In pinning the blame on Israel for this new war, they are attempting to sanitise the blood-soaked reality of US imperialism.
While Israel clearly has played a significant role in urging the US into this war, Trump is carrying it out to strengthen his own country’s hold over trade routes and oil reserves—not to serve Netanyahu. For decades, some US establishment figures have labelled Iran a rogue state and argued for military action against it. But successive administrations refused to carry that out.
Former President Barack Obama sought to “contain” Iran through a pact that traded sanctions relief for agreements to wind back the country’s nuclear program. This was not out of humanitarian concern. The sanctions had a devastating effect, and Obama infamously killed more people in drone strikes during his first year than Republican George W. Bush did in his entire presidency. The immense energy crisis caused by Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates the stakes for the US establishment in outright war with Iran.
But Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s allies, has urged war for three decades. Late Senator John McCain, like Graham, opposed the Iran nuclear deal. He argued instead for pre-emptive strikes, telling news outlet USA Today that “standing by ... is not a choice. It is an abdication”. Although internally divided on strategy, the political and military establishment has long agreed that Iran needs to be countered.
It may seem odd that far-right figures like Fuentes, Carlson and Kent are so determined to criticise Israel, given that none of them supports the Palestinian national struggle. Kent is a conspiracy theorist who employed members of the fascist gang Proud Boys in a 2022 electoral campaign. Carlson is an attack dog of the far right who has long argued that Muslim migrants are swamping white America, and that foreigners make the US dirtier.
For them, obsessive opposition to Israel comes from a fanatical blood and soil nationalism. It is tied to antisemitism. When Carlson hosted the Hitler-loving, prominent white supremacist and antisemite Fuentes on his show recently, Fuentes said that neoconservatism “arises from Jewish leftists”. Carlson replied, “Yeah, that’s a lot of it for sure”. Kent’s resignation statement presented Trump as having been manipulated by “high-ranking Israeli officials”. His statement also blamed Israel for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the broader war on terror.
But the US has never needed to be bullied or cajoled into carrying out mass slaughter. It cemented its place as the world’s leading superpower by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. The US emerged from the war as the architect of a new “rules-based world order” dominated by US-led economic institutions. From the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency helped to install murderous dictatorships across Latin America to ensure US domination of its own region.
Since then, domination of the Middle East has been a core plank of US foreign policy. In 1953, the CIA helped to overthrow Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, replacing him with pro-Western Shah Reza Pahlavi. The US contributed to the coup not to help Israel, but to ensure its own access to oil and trade routes. It was years later, from 1962 onward, that the US established a serious strategic and military relationship with Israel. This did not happen because of the whims of Jewish officials, but because Israel demonstrated that it could be a key guarantor of US interests in the region, in particular through the 1967 Six-Day War.
In 1986, Joe Biden told the Senate: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region”. He did so while warning against arming Saudi Arabia, presenting Israel as a more loyal part of the Western bloc and saying that “naked self-interest of the US” should drive foreign policy.
None of this is to say that Israel itself is a puppet of the US. After carrying out genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu and his cabinet have forced 1 million people from their homes in southern Lebanon and destroyed the crossings linking it to the rest of the country, beginning the annexation of the land up to the Litani River. Israel and the US act as extensions of each other’s power in the region while pursuing their own interests, and while this can at times mean butting heads, it broadly serves both.
Those who support Palestine should reject the Israel-centric view of the world that far-right pundits are pushing. It leads in a backwards direction, feeding the outright antisemitism of the right. And it blunts criticism of US imperialism, which is one of the key purveyors of oppression and destruction across the world.
