Joe Kent Warns Trump Against Boots On The Ground In Iran

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Great point about the cleaning up his language after the fact into no enriched uranium. And you know, when you go to the Iranian side and what they're demanding, they have some demands that might be huge red lines for the United States. Like for instance, Iran wants all, you know, US military out of the region. And they did destroy our bases in Gulf countries. And so, is that something that you think the Trump administration would be open to?

[00:00:31]>> I think the gut reaction is to say, "We'll never back down. We're going to keep our bases here, gosh darn it." But a lot of us have been advocating for a very long time that our bases in these regions, they're actually more of a strategic liability than they are an asset. And this last iteration of conflict with Iran really proved that.

[00:00:47]Our bases, we had to evacuate. We had to have our guys go and scatter out to local hotels. We took major damage at at CENTCOM headquarters. We're always going to need some degree of, you know, we call it, you know, basing and overflight, and you the ability to use some airfields, the ability to use ports. We're always going to use need that. But the ability to have a large military presence on Iran's borders, I I believe actually plays to our enemy plays to Iran's strengths cuz if they can reach out and touch us with their weapon systems, then it's game on. It's a fair fight for them. We have the ability, and we proved this with Midnight Hammer. We have the ability to reach all the way across the world and strike our enemies if we want to, and then pull our troops back away from their striking distance. So, I think this is like the easiest one for Trump to give to the Iranians and say, "Okay, fine. We'll pull up We'll pull the vast majority of our basing out of the region. We'll occasionally use some places here and there for for overflight. Fine, we'll give you that one." And then Trump can turn to the American people and say, "Yeah, these bases were dumb anyways." Just like he's doing with with a lot of the basing in Europe. He can be like, "This is an old construct. We're getting ripped off on the whole deal. We're going to bring our guys back home." It's like win-win for both sides. So, I think that's an easy one that we can just move on past. Give the Iranians a quick win. We take a quick win. It's tactically good business for us as well.

[00:01:58]>> I agree with you. Uh Final question and this is a little bit of a maybe controversial tricky one. So, you know, a few weeks back there was an alleged rescue operation on Iranian soil by the US military. We lost several military air aircraft in that in that mission.

[00:02:18]I I don't think we're getting the whole story there. I want to know why we were so far in Iranian territory. Was there an effort to retrieve enriched uranium?

[00:02:30]Is that what was going on there?

[00:02:33]>> I was out of the government by then, so honestly I don't know.

[00:02:36]The good news that came out of that number one is that no one none of our guys were killed and we got them all out. But number two, whether that was a botched operation or that was actually legitimately a recovery operation, we did get a taste of how hard it is to operate in Iran. Iran's a big country.

[00:02:53]We projecting power into Iran is actually very very challenging. And I'm glad that we got everybody out without anyone getting hurt and that gave President Trump a taste of how challenging boots on the ground operations would be. Because prior to that, we were seeing a full court press by Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, FDD, all of them were yelling about, you know, going boots on the ground, taking one of the islands, you know, actually putting forces in there to support some of the the so-called resistance fighters. Ever since that happened, a lot of those cries have died down and I think the president saw, you know, how close he was to becoming like Jimmy Carter and having a desert one type of scenario when we went in back in '79 and tried to recover our hostages and we had that catastrophic accident.

[00:03:37]So, I don't have any like inside information. I don't know. I'm just really glad that everyone got out okay and we kind of got our fill of it, hopefully got our fill of attempting boots on the ground operations.

[00:03:47]>> Yeah, I mean if that was an enlightening experience for the president and that would prevent boots on the ground, then I'm all for I'm all for it because I think it would be disastrous, especially when you consider what the you know, the number of troops that went into Iraq in that preemptive war. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of troops. We have like what? 50,000 military personnel and about I don't know how many of them are combat veterans or of combat troops. Uh, but not all 50,000 of them are. And so, you compare the terrain or uh, the size of Iran versus Iraq. I mean, it's night and day. It's a far more challenging war. Putting boots on the ground is like a death sentence for our soldiers. I really, really want to prevent that from happening. But, I I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today and give us a little bit of um, you know, knowledge on what's going on. And I hope you'll come back soon. Thank you so much.

[00:04:41]>> Hey Jenk, thanks for having me.

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