Letters to America: The Acceleration

Hello again my lovelies

I have been trying to find the right word for what has happened since I published the last two pieces in this series - the Enforcement Paradox and the Anatomy of Revolutions in February.

The word is acceleration.

Not collapse. Not coup. Not yet.

But something has shifted in the texture of events that I recognise from other contexts, and which I think we need to name carefully and honestly.

In my previous pieces I argued that the United States was firmly in Stage One of Brinton’s revolutionary cycle, with Stage Two symptoms beginning to appear.

That was February. It is now April. The symptoms are no longer merely appearing; several are now present in documented, observable, institutional form.

More on that below…

This piece works through seven interlocking developments since the Iran strikes began on February 28th.

Taken separately, each is alarming.

Taken together, they describe a system under acute stress whose internal brakes have been systematically removed - and whose most important scheduled checkpoint, the November midterms, is already being conspired against.

I want to be clear about what this piece is not.

It is not a prediction of inevitable catastrophe. Revolutions are not inevitable even when the pre-conditions are present.

Societies can pull back.

But the window for pulling back narrows when warning signs go unaddressed. The purpose of these Letters to you has always been to help you see the window clearly - from the outside looking in.

First: What Has Actually Happened

Those outside the United States may be following developments through the distorting lens of their own media2, so it is worth establishing the factual baseline.

February 28th: The United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran - targeting nuclear sites, missile factories, IRGC command facilities and civilian infrastructure in Tehran, Isfahan and Qom. Trump declared “major combat operations,” called for regime change, and said he would order “bombs dropping everywhere” until the Islamic Republic fell. And all this in the middle of what looked like successful negotiations around Iran’s nuclear capabilities…

March 2026: A number of US commanders began telling troops that the Iran war was “God’s divine plan” and that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”3

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) received over 200 complaints from personnel at 50+ military installations within 72 hours. Trump’s approval rating collapsed to 36%—with economic approval at 29%, lower than Biden’s worst.

April 2nd-3rd: Your Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, the Army Chief of Chaplains Major General William Green, and two other senior generals.

Fired.

During active combat operations.

This brings the total of generals and admirals fired or forced out since January 2025 to more than twenty.

April 7th: Trump posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He set a deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face total annihilation - including the destruction of civilian infrastructure - this post in and of itself has been identified as genocidal intent by leaders of other countries, international law scholars and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention.

Genocidal intent is a war crime.

A ceasefire brokered by Pakistan was announced shortly before the deadline, averting the immediate threat. It took six hours for Netanyahu to decide that he didn’t fancy the conditions as it included Lebanon.

That is the factual spine. Now the analysis.

1 - The Purge and the Civil-Military Fracture

Those of us who have served understand what it means when a military fires its most experienced officers in the middle of a war. It is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of fear.

General Randy George was, by any professional assessment, among the most respected soldiers in the United States Army. Retired General Barry McCaffrey described him as “perhaps the best leader I’ve encountered in uniform.” He was fired mid-term, without public justification, during active combat operations - a near-unprecedented act in modern American military history.

He was fired, insiders say, after demanding a meeting with Hegseth to discuss the secretary’s blocking of promotions for Black and female officers - a meeting Hegseth refused to hold.

The Joint Staff’s official social media account posted a tribute to General George the evening after his firing.

Read that sentence again.

The institutional nerve centre of the American military publicly honoured a general that its civilian leadership had just dismissed. That is not protocol. That is a signal - quietly, within the professional norms of military culture - and the most defiant signal the institution can send without crossing into insubordination.

The simultaneous firing of the Army Chief of Chaplains is the element that most interests me as an analyst. Major General William Green was not fired because he failed in battle. He was fired - apparently - because the Army’s senior religious leader was unwilling to endorse a war being framed as waged in the name of Christ. The removal of the institution’s chief moral and spiritual officer, precisely at the moment that officer’s function became most needed, tells you something important about what the civilian leadership fears.

What Brinton’s framework predicts, and what history confirms, is that the professional military is the single most important variable in whether a pre-revolutionary situation resolves or escalates.

Armies that remain cohesive and obedient to political authority - even deeply unpopular authority - tend to prevent revolution.

The historical truth is that armies that fracture, that refuse to enact what they see as unjust or illegal orders, that defect to protesters or simply stand aside, tend to enable revolution.

The purge of experienced, constitutionally-minded officers and their replacement with politically compliant ones does not make the force more loyal. It makes it more brittle - and it removes the people most likely to say no to catastrophic orders.

2 - The Holy War

I have a particular and personal stake in the holy war question - and indeed in everything that happens in the Middle East. From Iraq in the early 2000s, to our withdrawal from Afghanistan in 20214 , I saw the impact on my brothers and sisters in arms, on good friends, and on my family5, when a conflict that has complex political, economic and regional roots gets reframed as a civilisational or religious confrontation.

It does not help. It does not unify. It radicalises opponents, alienates potential allies, shatters the moral clarity that professional soldiers need to function under impossible conditions, and - most importantly - it hands the opposing side the one narrative that can mobilise populations that have every reason to hate their own government but would never fight for a foreign invader.

The Iran war is being framed, at the command level, as a Christian crusade. Pete Hegseth’s book, speeches and conduct have provided the theological framework.

Commanders in the field are implementing it. Troops - many of them Muslim, Jewish, secular, or from Christian traditions that take very seriously the prohibition against using faith as a weapon - are filing formal complaints in numbers that the MRFF describes as unprecedented in its history.

The experts are right: this framing is playing directly into Iran’s hands. The Islamic Republic has spent over four decades telling its people that America is a crusading enemy of Islam.

For most of those forty years, many Iranians - those who know better, who have family in the diaspora, who have been protesting and dying to overthrow their own government - did not believe it. They were right not to believe it. They had a sophisticated understanding of the difference between American policy and American people. Between Israeli geopolitical interests, and the beliefs of ordinary Americans.

That distinction is now being systematically destroyed, from the top of the American command structure downwards.

Iranian civilians who had every reason to welcome their regime’s fall are watching American bombs fall on their cities while American commanders tell their troops it is God’s plan.

If this continues, the insurgency that follows any ground campaign will not be an IRGC operation. It will be a national one. I saw the early stages of this dynamic in Iraq. Friends and colleagues saw it in Afghanistan.

I have no appetite to watch the full version play out in a country three times the size of Iraq, with a population far more politically conscious and a military far more capable of asymmetric warfare.

3 - “A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight”

On April 7th, 2026, the President of the United States of America posted on Truth Social that a whole civilisation would die that night.

I am going to ask you to sit with that sentence, because I think we have already begun to normalise it, and we should not.

No American president has ever made a public threat of civilisational annihilation.

Not during the Cold War, when the United States actually had the capacity to destroy the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union had the capacity to destroy it.

Not during the Korean War, when MacArthur’s nuclear ambitions had to be checked by Truman.

Not in Vietnam, when the conflict spiralled far beyond its original scope, and US Air Force General Curtis LeMay called for the country to be “bombed back to the Stone Age” (sound familiar?)

The normative constraint against civilisational threats was understood as foundational to the international order - not as a legal technicality, but as a fundamental limit on what leaders of nuclear powers say in public, because the words of such leaders have effects that cannot always be recalled.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention - the world’s foremost academic body on the subject - issued a formal Red Flag Alert calling Trump’s words “some of the clearest indications of genocidal intent made publicly since the adoption of the Genocide Convention.” Amnesty International called on the UK government to end military support to the United States.

In one of my previous pieces I described the “enforcement paradox” - the fact that institutions can issue rulings but cannot, on their own, enforce them against an executive that refuses to comply.

That paradox has now reached its most extreme possible domain. With General George fired, with the Army’s Chief of Chaplains removed, with twenty senior officers purged from the command structure, with Hegseth describing the regime in Tehran as “toast” and US commanders framing the war as divine mandate - who is left in the senior chain of command with the balls to say “this order is unlawful, I will not carry it out”?

This is not a hypothetical.

It is the most urgent practical question facing the United States military right now.

And the answer, post-purge, is: fewer people than there were in February. Fewer people with the institutional standing, the professional confidence, and the personal security to refuse.

JD Vance implicitly threatened nuclear deployment in the same news cycle as Trump’s post.

A senior UN official resigned, citing intelligence suggesting a planned nuclear strike on Iran.

The ceasefire arrived. But the architecture that produced the threat - the hollowed command structure, the theological framing, the civilian leadership’s contempt for military and legal norms - remains fully intact.

4 - The Six-Hour Ceasefire: Lebensraum in Lebanon?

The ceasefire Trump announced on April 8th - only a couple of short hours before the deadline he gave in his “whole civilisation” threat - lasted precisely six hours before Israel launched what Lebanon’s Civil Defence called its deadliest bombardment since the war began: 254 killed, 1,165 wounded, over 100 sites hit in Beirut, Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

Iran and Pakistan insist Lebanon was part of the deal; the US and Israel say no. Or at least the US now says no, because Netanyahu has willed it.

Israeli officials claim they only hit Hezbollah targets. But the scale of attack - on urban areas, with a heavy civilian toll of lives and infrastructure - and Netanyahu’s past rhetoric (Gaza as “Amalek,” southern Lebanon as buffer zone) suggest something more territorial: a push for his version of a de facto Lebensraum (oh the irony).

Displacing populations to create a security perimeter that - given past Israeli behaviour - will almost certainly become permanent (Golan Heights anyone?).

Amnesty’s pre-ceasefire report documented 10,000+ structures destroyed in southern Lebanon, often without “imperative military necessity.”

This is the enforcement paradox in international form: the US brokers a truce it cannot enforce on its own ally, which then uses the pause to advance maximalist aims. The result? Iran resumes Hormuz closures; the war reignites. A regime that cannot make commitments stick - domestically or abroad - is the definition of Stage Two fragility.

5 - The Domestic Vise

None of this happens in a vacuum. While bombs fall on Tehran, Americans are facing the sharpest domestic squeeze in a generation.

• The “One Big Beautiful Bill” cut SNAP (food stamps) funding by $187 billion through 2034. The CBO estimates 2.4 million people will lose food assistance in an average month.

• Work requirements have been extended to veterans, homeless persons, former foster kids and adults between 55 and 64 - the groups facing the most severe employment discrimination.

• Food banks are overwhelmed. In one survey, food bank directors described demand as “unlike anything we have seen outside a natural disaster.”

• Health insurance premiums rose 6-7% for 2026 - double the general inflation rate. Average family deductibles now stand at approximately $8,900 a year. Medicare Part B rose 9.7%, the highest in four years.

And then there is the completely and utterly unnecessary oil shock.

The Strait of Hormuz - through which 20% of global oil and gas normally flows - has been effectively paralysed by the conflict. Brent crude rose more than 50% to over $110 a barrel by mid-March. Goldman Sachs projected prices could reach $130 a barrel in Q2 2026. Bloomberg models $200 a barrel scenarios if the conflict persists beyond three months.

American gas prices have already exceeded $4 a gallon6 - the number that, more than any other single indicator, destroyed Biden’s political standing and that Trump explicitly weaponised throughout the 2024 campaign.

The political consequences are already visible in the data.

Trump’s overall approval stands at 36-39%. His approval for handling the economy has crashed to 29% - lower than Biden’s worst quarter. His approval for the Iran war sits at a net minus 30 in YouGov/Economist polling. On the generic congressional ballot, Democrats lead by 7 points with an 18-point advantage among independents.

This is the domestic dimension of the revolutionary framework.

Brinton’s Stage One requires economic stress, class antagonism, and the desertion of professional classes. All three are now present in acute form. Those members of the professional and middle classes who voted for “America First” and “no more foreign wars” are watching their fuel bills, food costs and insurance premiums rise while their government wages a holy war in the Middle East that contradicts every promise they were made.

The MAGA coalition is fracturing along its most fundamental fault line: Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and a growing number of traditional conservatives are breaking with the administration over the Iran war, calling it a betrayal.

6 - The NATO Alliance: A Suez Moment?

In 1956, Britain and France launched a joint military operation to retake the Suez Canal. The United States, under Eisenhower, forced them to withdraw. The episode is remembered as the moment when European imperial primacy visibly ended - when the world understood that the old “Great Powers” could no longer act without American permission.

Analysts across Europe are now asking whether the Iran war represents the equivalent moment for American power: the point at which allies definitively conclude that Washington’s leadership cannot be relied upon, and begin building autonomous structures.

The response from NATO allies has been categorical in its withdrawal from American leadership. France and Italy have refused US access to airspace and military bases. Germany and France have issued joint ceasefire demands. The UK evacuated its Tehran embassy but refused military participation. Even the Trump-loving NATO Secretary-General Rutte - a Dutch politician who has spent his career as a diplomatic bridge-builder - publicly urged “de-escalation including by the United States.”

That formulation is unprecedented in NATO history. It treats the United States not as the alliance’s leader and guarantor but as one of the parties that needs to be restrained.

Trump’s response has been to threaten to withdraw from NATO entirely, calling it a “paper tiger.” He has threatened to stop the supply of weapons to Ukraine. Your Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, suggested that if NATO “exists solely to defend Europe when under attack” but won’t support the US in the Middle East, it is “not a very good arrangement” demonstrating that he is yet another Republican politician who has clearly never read the North Atlantic Treaty. 🙄

David Cattler’s statement - from the Centre for European Policy Analysis - is worth noting here: “The fundamental issue isn’t whether the U.S. departs NATO; it’s whether the allies maintain their trust in U.S. leadership. Alliances fracture not when nations leave, but when trust diminishes.”

That trust is now in freefall.

The America that European democracies had built seventy years of security architecture around - the America that believed in multilateralism, in the laws of armed conflict, in the distinction between civilians and combatants - has been replaced, for now, by an America whose ambassador to Israel preaches Armageddon, whose president threatens to kill entire civilisations, and whose defense secretary fires his most experienced general during wartime rather than face a conversation about racial equality in the officer corps.

The rest of NATO is predominantly secular. Its governments, its general staffs, its intelligence communities - they are watching this from a position of profound disorientation.

They are not anti-American.

But they are watching an ally whose policy is now being shaped, at least in part, by a theology that explicitly welcomes the end of the world as a desirable outcome. And they are working out, quietly, what their security posture looks like in a world where that ally is no longer predictable.

7 - Will There Be Midterm Elections?

This is the question I keep pondering, as I see the US becoming increasingly fractured and a demented senile President (and Republican Party) becoming ever more desperate to cling onto power.

At this point in time, my research and analyses indicate the elections will almost certainly take place.

The constitutional framework is clear:

• Only Congress can change federal election dates

• The delivery of Federal elections is undertaken by individual State Administrations

• No emergency powers statute authorises the president to suspend elections

• Courts have already struck down Trump’s earlier executive order on elections as exceeding presidential authority.

There is no plausible legal route to cancellation that does not require either Congress (currently impossible) or a Supreme Court intervention so radical it would itself constitute a constitutional rupture.

Trump has already said, explicitly, that the midterms should be cancelled - twice in January 2026. He followed each statement by insisting he had said no such thing.

The pattern is familiar: test the boundary, read the reaction, retreat when challenged, but leave the idea in the air. He also told House Republicans that he fears the midterms precisely because a Democratic House means impeachment.

But the more important question is not whether elections happen. It is whether the results will be recognised and implemented.

The architecture of suppression already exists:

• The Justice Department has sued 43+ states to obtain detailed voter data - names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth.

• Twenty-three states have refused and are being sued.

• The stated purpose is “voter roll integrity.”

The practical effect is the capacity to conduct mass purges of eligible voters in Democratic-leaning states ahead of November, using data that the administration has refused to explain how it intends to use.

A 17-page draft executive order - reviewed by PBS, NPR and the Washington Post - planned to declare a national security emergency based on fabricated claims of Chinese interference in 2020, use it to ban most no-excuse mail voting, mandate hand-counting of all ballots, ban ballots in any language other than English, require re-registration with proof of citizenship, and give federal authorities control of voting machines and ballot data.

Pro-Trump lawyers confirmed “certain coordination” with White House officials. Trump publicly denied knowledge of the draft then posted on Truth Social that he would impose voter ID “whether approved by Congress or not.”

The White House Press Secretary was unable to guarantee that ICE agents would not be present at polling locations. The Brennan Center has noted formally that the threat of ICE presence at polls - regardless of whether it is actually carried out - functions as voter intimidation, particularly in mixed-status communities.

The FBI raid on Fulton County’s 2020 election materials - with the Director of National Intelligence personally present at a domestic law enforcement operation - sent an unambiguous message to every county election administrator in America: the federal government is willing to treat the administration of any elections Trump has lost as a national security matter subject to criminal investigation.

And Trump himself, in the context of Ukraine and Zelensky, said that “there should be no more elections” during wartime. The United States is now at war. Funny that.

The scenario that most concerns me - the one I think you should be preparing your thinking for - is not cancellation. It is this:

• The midterms take place

• Democrats win a majority in the House

• The Speaker either fails to recall the House or finds reasons to refuse to seat some or all of the winning members

• The unseated members organise separately and claim to be the legitimate House

• Some states recognise one body and some the other, along extremely partisan lines

• Federal agencies and military leaders receive conflicting instructions from competing authorities both of which claim to be the government.

That is dual sovereignty.

That is Brinton’s Stage Two, fully realised.

And everything that has happened since February - the military purges, the holy war, the genocide threats, the voter data seizures, the ICE intimidation architecture - can be read as preparation for that moment.

Where You Now Are in Brinton’s Cycle of Revolution

Let me directly update my assessment of less than 6 weeks ago.

In February I placed the United States firmly in Stage One with Stage Two symptoms beginning to appear.

I now assess that Stage Two is in active onset. And the key markers?

• Every use of force - in the Middle East, against SNAP recipients, against election officials, against senior military officers - generates documented resistance from some part of the institutional structure.

• MRFF complaints, congressional impeachment articles, Joint Staff tribute posts, state attorney general lawsuits, NATO condemnation: the resistance is not yet sufficient to stop anything, but it is no longer absent.

• General George’s firing galvanises the professional military and veterans communities.

• The genocide threat galvanises international allies and international law communities.

• SNAP cuts galvanise food-insecure families, faith communities and healthcare workers.

• Oil-shock inflation galvanises the suburban middle class that voted for “America First.”

Each of these audiences is being radicalised by a different injustice, but they share an underlying grievance: a regime that does not operate in good faith toward the people it governs.

Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Republican defence officials, traditional business conservatives, and senior military voices are all publicly breaking with the administration on the Iran war. This is not yet the scale of fracture that historical revolutionary situations require, but it is directionally significant.

Congressional war powers votes, impeachment articles, 25th Amendment calls, and competing state-federal claims over voter data are all, in Brinton’s terms, early iterations of competing authority claims.

None has yet produced a genuine dual government.

The November midterms are the moment when that could change.

The professional officer corps has not defected. But the purge has removed its most independent voices. The remaining senior commanders are either politically compliant or privately furious and externally silent. The MRFF complaints suggest a rank-and-file that is more disturbed than is publicly visible.

The conditions for fragmentation - soldiers ordered to fight a holy war they do not believe in, on behalf of a commander they do not trust, under civilian leadership that has just fired their most respected general - are now present.

History does not repeat. But it rhymes with enough precision that the rhyme is worth listening to.

The Nuclear Question

I want to address this directly, because I know it is in many of your minds.

The combination of Trump’s civilisational threat, Vance’s nuclear implication, a UN official’s resignation citing strike intelligence, and the systematic removal of experienced military officers from the chain of command raises a question that would have seemed paranoid to ask two years ago: is the United States likely to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike under the current command structure?

The technical answer is yes.

The president has sole authority to order nuclear use.

The “two-man rule” requires the concurrence of the Secretary of Defense - currently Pete Hegseth, the least qualified defense secretary in American history - who has publicly framed this war as a holy crusade.

There is no legal mechanism by which a general, a joint chief, or a congressional leader can unilaterally prevent a nuclear launch order from being executed.

The practical constraints are the professional military’s own norms and the likely refusal of launch crews to execute an order they believed was unlawful.

But those constraints depend on the existence of a cohesive, independently-minded professional military. That is precisely what the purge has been dismantling.

I am not predicting a nuclear strike. I am saying that the architecture of restraint that has maintained nuclear non-use since 1945 depends on institutional checks that are being systematically removed, and that this dependency should be named clearly rather than treated as too alarming to discuss.

A Note on the Chenoweth Threshold

In previous pieces I have written about Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s research finding that no nonviolent campaign that achieved active participation by 3.5% of the population had ever failed to achieve its goals. I also noted the important caveat that the rule is historical rather than mechanical, and that Georgia’s (the country not the State) 2024 experience showed how calibrated repression can neutralise even large movements.

The “No Kings” coalition has reportedly mobilised close to or beyond that threshold at key moments. The March 28th national day of action aimed for nine million participants. I don’t have verified final numbers yet, but the videos appear to show a massive turnout, across the whole of the US - and in Red States as much as in Purple and Blue ones.

What I do know is that the social preconditions for sustained mass mobilisation - economic pain, moral outrage, cross-class coalition, and the beginnings of elite fracture - are now substantially more advanced than they were when the first “No Kings” protests occurred in October 2025.

The question that Chenoweth’s research cannot fully answer is: what happens when the 3.5% mobilises but the institutional response is not courts and negotiation but ICE at polling places, generals fired, and genocide threats? The historical data has not included cases where the government had pre-positioned immigration enforcement at the means of democratic accountability.

That is the question your movement needs to be asking - not just “can we get enough people in the streets” but “what is our plan if the streets are not the decisive venue?”

In Closing

I began this particular series of Letters to America posts with a letter written from the perspective of a former allied officer who has watched how American democracy operates from the outside. For over 40 years this was with respect: it’s now with growing alarm.

My perspective has not changed. What has changed is the speed of events.

In February I wrote that the US was in late Stage One of a revolutionary cycle with Stage Two symptoms beginning. I said the window for addressing these conditions through law, politics and institutional reform was still open.

I still believe that.

But windows do not stay open indefinitely, and the events of the last six weeks have been among the most consequential in closing it.

The November midterms are not a solution. They are a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition. The elections will probably happen. Whether the results will be honoured is a different question - one that the administration’s entire pre-election architecture of voter data seizure, ICE intimidation, emergency EO drafting and wartime framing suggests they are actively preparing to contest.

What that means for the resistance - legal, institutional, political, and in the streets - is the most important practical question facing American democracy right now.

Until next time, my lovelies

Take care, stay safe, and continue to be awesome…

…and Vive La Résistance! 🗽