Did the U.S. 'Create ISIS' for Israel? Joe Kent's Explosive Claim, the Syrian Proxy Wars, and Where the Evidence Actually Stops
Former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent has moved from resigning over the Iran war to making much broader claims about U.S. proxy policy in Syria. Are those claims whistleblowing, ideological overreach, or a distorted version of a darker truth — that great powers often backed terrible armed actors without literally creating them?
When former U.S. National Counterterrorism Center chief Joe Kent resigned over the Iran war, the immediate story was institutional dissent. Then the narrative widened. In public comments and interviews, Kent has pushed much more explosive arguments about the deeper roots of U.S. Middle East policy, including the claim that Washington strategically armed or relied on jihadist proxies in Syria in ways that served Israel’s interests against Iran. Online, that has already been flattened into a much simpler slogan: “The U.S. created ISIS.”
That is the sort of phrase that travels instantly and misleads almost as fast. But dismissing it without analysis would be lazy. The proper question is not whether the internet’s simplified slogan is accurate — it is not, at least not on the public evidence. The proper question is what real historical patterns make a slogan like that feel persuasive to so many people.
First, some clarity. There is no credible mainstream evidence that the United States literally sat down and designed ISIS as a proprietary creation. The rise of ISIS came out of a far more chaotic mix: the Iraq war, sectarian collapse, prison radicalization, Syrian state breakdown, Gulf funding flows to armed Islamist milieus, Turkish border permissiveness in key periods, miscalculation by multiple regional actors, and the grotesque opportunism of militant entrepreneurs exploiting state failure. To say “the U.S. created ISIS” as if it were a clean boardroom project is historically false.
But that is not the end of the conversation. Because there is a second, darker question: did U.S. policy, along with allied regional policy, tolerate, empower, or indirectly benefit from militant ecosystems in Syria when they were seen as useful against Assad, Iran, or Hezbollah? Here the answer becomes far less comfortable. The Syrian war is full of morally contaminated alignments, covert programs, selective blindness, and proxy relationships that did not map neatly onto public slogans about moderates versus extremists. States do not always “create” monsters in the simplistic sense. Sometimes they help create the environment in which monsters thrive and then act surprised by the outcome.
Kent’s intervention draws force from that ambiguity. He is tapping into a widely felt suspicion that the official Western story about Syria was always too clean, too selective, and too willing to treat anti-Assad utility as strategic virtue. Critics of U.S. policy have argued for years that Washington and its partners drew distinctions within the armed opposition that were sometimes too convenient, too temporary, or too detached from battlefield reality. In wars like Syria, weapons, training, money, intelligence, and territorial control do not remain inside neat bureaucratic boxes. Alliances mutate. Fighters defect. groups cooperate tactically. Material leaks.
The strongest version of Kent’s claim, if stripped of viral excess, is not that the United States literally invented ISIS from scratch for Israel. It is that the broader anti-Assad, anti-Iran architecture of the Syrian war produced incentives that made jihadist ecosystems more useful than governments wanted to admit, and that some policymakers were willing to live with ugly militant realities so long as pressure on Damascus and Tehran continued. That is still a serious charge. It is also more historically plausible than the sloganized version.
Still, there are reasons to be cautious about Kent’s framing. He is not speaking from a neutral archive. He is now a highly polarized political actor, under scrutiny himself, and operating in a media environment where dramatic narrative can be as important as precise documentation. A true thing stated imprecisely can become a false impression. And a false impression can become politically useful even when built around fragments of truth.
There are at least three analytical positions here.
The first is the dismissal camp: Kent is simply laundering conspiracy through his former title. This view emphasizes that ISIS slaughtered Americans, regional minorities, Muslims of all sects, and eventually became a major U.S. military target. Under this reading, the claim collapses under basic strategic logic. Why would Washington intentionally create a force it later spent blood and treasure destroying?
The second position is the “blowback” reading. It says no, Washington did not create ISIS as a designed instrument, but yes, U.S. and allied decisions in Iraq and Syria created conditions under which ISIS could emerge, expand, and mutate. This is arguably the most historically defensible mainstream critique. Creation here is indirect, structural, and disastrous rather than intentional and linear.
The third position is the “proxy ecosystem” argument. It goes further than blowback and says some state actors knowingly tolerated, enabled, or worked through armed environments in which jihadist power was not accidental collateral but part of the battlefield equation against common enemies. This does not prove a direct U.S.-ISIS pipeline. It does imply a morally catastrophic willingness to use or excuse violent anti-Iran and anti-Assad militancy until the cost became too high.
Where does Israel fit into this? Online discourse often adds “for Israel” because it is trying to make strategic motive legible. Israel did benefit from the weakening of Iranian and Hezbollah-linked positions in Syria. That does not mean every U.S. or regional policy error in Syria can be reduced to an Israeli master plan. Multi-actor wars are almost never that tidy. But it is fair to ask whether anti-Iran priorities distorted how different powers assessed acceptable risk among anti-Assad armed forces.
This is why the argument remains so combustible. It sits at the intersection of real policy failure, real proxy warfare, real secrecy, and exaggerated narrative simplification. The public knows governments lie. It knows Syria was dirty. It knows armed groups shifted constantly. It knows “moderate rebel” rhetoric often aged badly. Into that environment, a former senior official says the quiet part out loud — or appears to. That is enough to ignite a fire even if the phrase doing the rounds is too crude to survive serious scrutiny.
So did the United States “create ISIS”? No, not in the viral sense. Did U.S. and partner policy help build the conditions in which ISIS could rise, while also navigating morally rotten militant ecosystems for broader strategic goals? Yes, that is a much more serious and difficult question, and history does not let Washington off easily.
Kent’s claim therefore should neither be swallowed whole nor laughed away. It should be translated. Beneath the internet slogan lies a harder accusation: that great powers repeatedly pursued regional leverage in ways that tolerated chaos, empowered violent proxies, and then rewrote the story once the monster escaped the frame. That accusation is not new. But when it comes from a former counterterrorism chief during a widening Iran war, it stops being merely historical. It becomes a warning about how states still think.