What Do You Mean, “Rally Around the Flag”?
David Frum sees the paradox. He just won’t name the machine.
Eight AM, Saturday, February 28, 2026—The waffle was covered in whipped cream and strawberries. I was sitting in a diner in Ontario, California, reading David Frum’s Atlantic piece on my phone, and the strawberries were that bright diner red that doesn’t occur in nature. The TV above the counter had the sound off. Closed captions scrolled: Tehran. Explosions. Operation Epic Fury. A woman two booths over was laughing about something on her own phone. A kid was kicking their legs back and forth, dangling off a chair.
I kept reading. I kept eating. And I kept feeling something I’ve felt before and have only recently learned to name: the sensation of being in two places at once. Here, in the territory—a diner, a Saturday, a waffle getting cold. And there, in the map—the abstraction called “war,” now being projected onto a country of ninety million people by a president who posted a video on Truth Social telling Iranian civilians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.”
I deployed to Iraq twice in 2003 and again in 2008. Afghanistan in 2011 and 2013. Five combat tours as a Marine combat engineer. I built camps and tore them down in both countries. I watched Saddam's statue come down, and then I watched what came after—the looting, the power vacuums, the slow unraveling that no briefing slide had anticipated. By the time I came back at the end of 2003, the place looked nothing like the victory map. When I came back in 2008, we were still building things in the wreckage of what we'd promised. I know what "freedom" sounds like in an operational plan. I know what it looks like on the ground eighteen months later, when the power grid is down, and the interpreters who trusted you are trying to get their families out.
So when I sat in that diner reading Frum’s article—an intelligent piece, a well-constructed piece—I felt both attached and detached. Attached because I know what it costs when a country decides to do this. I’ve carried that cost in my body. Detached because the essay I was reading, for all its sharpness, was still operating on a map. The territory was somewhere else entirely.
The Map and the Territory of “Opportunity”
Frum’s article runs on a clean binary: opportunity (free Iran) vs. danger (unchecked Trump). He structures the whole thing around that split. The frame is doing a lot of work, maybe too much.
Here’s where I agree. The Iranian people’s courage is beyond dispute. Millions rose against their government. Tens of thousands died. The Human Rights Activists News Agency estimates over 7,000 killed. The International Centre for Human Rights puts the number at 43,000. Security forces flooded residential neighborhoods on motorbikes, showing off their guns to create fear. Hospitals were overwhelmed. The regime imposed the longest internet blackout on record to keep the world from seeing what it was doing. Those who could communicate with the outside world asked for help. That is real. Those are real people.
Here’s where I start asking questions. Frum writes as if the “opportunity” becomes self-evident once the regime’s military assets are degraded. As if the word “freedom” can travel from a Truth Social video to the streets of Tehran on the back of a cruise missile and arrive meaning what we think it means.
This is a Ghost Map.
I use that term in my book to describe abstractions that have detached from the messy territory they once tried to represent. “Freedom,” as deployed in Trump’s video statement, functions as a permission structure wearing the clothes of a destination. I’ve seen this before. I’ve stood inside it.
In 2003, the map said “liberation.” The territory said something else. Looted ministries. Collapsing infrastructure. Sectarian fault lines that the briefing slides never mentioned. An insurgency that metastasized in the gap between what we promised and what we built. I watched the statue come down. I was there for every month that followed, as the gap between the word “liberation” and the reality on the ground widened into something that swallowed four thousand American lives and two trillion dollars. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, in his statement today, said what I’ve been saying for twenty years: the statue falling was the beginning of chaos, the easy part. The hard part was everything that came after—and nobody had a plan for it.
Iran is almost four times larger than Iraq. Its military is far more capable. Its regional alliances run deeper, and its asymmetric capabilities make escalation unpredictable even from limited strikes. And no one—not Trump, not Frum, not the Pentagon—has described what the day after looks like.
Frum acknowledges the uncertainty—“the outcome is obviously extremely uncertain”—and then keeps writing as if the upside is real, and the downside is manageable. That’s the structure of adolescent risk assessment. I’ve seen it in operational planning sessions. The people who’ve never been downrange draw clean arrows on the map. The people who have been downrange stare at the blank spaces between the arrows and ask: what happens there?
What Does “Without Congress” Actually Mean?
Here’s where Frum’s analysis gets sharper, and where my framework meets his argument squarely.
Trump launched this war without congressional authorization. The Constitution assigns the power to declare war to Congress. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours and bars deployment beyond 60 days without legislative approval. What happened instead: Secretary of State Rubio called the Gang of Eight shortly before the strikes began. The Armed Services Committees were notified after the bombs were already in the air.
This pattern is decades old. Obama intervened in Libya for eight months without asking Congress. Both Bushes used AUMFs—Authorizations for the Use of Military Force—as open-ended permission slips. Trump, in his first term, cited the 2002 Iraq AUMF to justify killing an Iranian general. The last time Congress actually declared war was 1942. Against Bulgaria.
So when Frum writes that Trump started this war “without even a figment of congressional authorization,” he’s right—and the honest version of that sentence has a longer tail: within a system that has been allowing presidents to start wars without real congressional authorization for the better part of a century.
This is the Korzybskian Gap in its institutional form. Our tools for making war scale at the speed of a cruise missile. Our tools for deciding whether to go to war still run on a document written when muskets took thirty seconds to reload. The Constitution anticipated deliberation. The national security state was built for speed. Every president—Democrat and Republican—has chosen speed.
I think about this gap every time I hear someone say “Commander in Chief” as if that title were self-authorizing. The title describes a role inside a system of constraints. The Constitution says the president commands the military that Congress authorizes—a relationship that has drifted so far from its original design that most Americans, and most members of Congress, have forgotten what the document actually requires.
The bipartisan war powers resolution from Reps. Khanna and Massie had been introduced before the strikes. It was already going to be a hard vote. Now, with bombs falling and service members at risk, it becomes nearly impossible. The machine works this way by design. You launch the war before the vote, and then the vote becomes a referendum on whether you “support the troops.” I’ve been one of those troops. Five times. I can tell you that “supporting” us means asking the hard questions before we get on the plane—asking them while there’s still time to change the answer.
The rally-around-the-flag effect—first described by political scientist John Mueller in 1970—is a known, studied, predictable phenomenon. Leaders experience short-term spikes in approval at the onset of international crises. Matthew Baum’s research at Harvard found that the spike is driven largely by independents and opposition-party members shifting toward the president. The more divided the country, the larger the rally effect.
So here’s the engineering question: Who benefits from launching a war eight days after the Supreme Court struck down your tariffs 6-3 and called them unconstitutional? Who benefits from starting a regional conflict five days after delivering a State of the Union speech that, as Frum notes, was “speckled with insults and stunts”?
The cause can be legitimate and the timing can be strategic and the institutional structure can be broken. Adult analysis holds all three. Adolescent analysis picks one and yells.
The Zoological Error in Real Time
Frum writes a line that stopped me mid-bite: “No president in American history has shown himself less trustworthy with power than Donald Trump.”
Strong claim. And I think it’s doing something Frum doesn’t fully intend. It personalizes a structural problem.
In my book, I call this the Zoological Error—the mistake of treating political systems as if they’re dominance hierarchies in a captive wolf pack, where all that matters is who the alpha is and whether the alpha is benign or malicious. The alpha framing makes great copy. It makes terrible institutional design.
The deeper question: Why does the system hand any single person the unilateral ability to launch a war that could kill hundreds of thousands of people, restructure the Middle East, and drain trillions of dollars—all before Congress reconvenes from recess?
Five deployments taught me something about leadership and systems. The best units I served in depended on structures—pre-mission checklists, after-action reviews, standing operating procedures, clear escalation protocols—that made good decisions likely regardless of who was in charge. The worst units ran on personality. When the CO was sharp, things worked. When the CO was reckless, people got hurt. A coin flip with lives on the table.
When Frum writes that “the ideal palliative would be for House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to act like the independent constitutional officers they are supposed to be,” he’s describing a repair that depends entirely on individual character. That’s the Gardener’s nightmare. You don’t build a bridge and then hope the bolts feel like holding. You design the structure so it holds whether the bolts are heroic or mediocre.
Rep. Warren Davidson, a Republican, said it today: “I have asked for a classified briefing defining the mission in Iran. In the absence of new information, I will support the War Powers resolution.” Rep. Thomas Massie, also Republican, called the strikes “acts of war unauthorized by Congress.” These are institutional immune responses—weak ones, from individual actors, pointing toward what an adult system would require: structural checks that don’t depend on courage, character, or the next election cycle.
The Paradox at the Center
Here’s the question that Frum’s article circles without ever landing on: How do you build systems powerful enough to handle the mess we’re in without handing some maniac the keys?
Frum wants the Iranian regime gone. He also wants the American president constrained. He recognizes that the man delivering “freedom” to Iran is the same man who, in Frum’s own words, tried to send members of Congress to prison for making a video reminding members of their duty to obey the law. That tension runs through every paragraph of his essay, and he never resolves it—because he can’t, within the frame he’s built.
What Frum leaves out matters more than what he puts in. His piece, for all its intelligence, has no structural proposal. No institutional repair. He calls for “a dozen Republican House members—even two or three senators—who remember the principles they supposedly believe.” A plea for individual virtue inside a system that has spent decades selecting against that virtue.
This is where the Engineer-Gardener framework matters. The Engineer in me sees the War Powers Resolution and says: this tool has been broken since the day it was passed. Every president has ignored it. No enforcement mechanism. Congress has discovered that passivity is electorally safer than assertion. The tool fails. Redesign it.
The Gardener in me sees the cultural layer underneath. A nation trained—by media cycles, by rally-around-the-flag dynamics, by decades of executive overreach from both parties—to treat war as the president’s prerogative and congressional oversight as an inconvenience. A statute alone won’t repair that. The repair lives in rebuilding the civic infrastructure that makes citizens capable of demanding something better—in classrooms, in newsrooms, in the cognitive immune system of a population running on Ghost Maps about what “strength” looks like.
The Repair
So what would adult institutional design look like in this moment?
First, the War Powers Resolution needs teeth. Real teeth. An automatic funding cutoff if Congress doesn’t affirmatively authorize military action within a defined window. No more “we’ll vote on it next week” while the 60-day clock runs and the war becomes a fait accompli. Senator Tim Kaine has been pushing versions of this for years. The structure should make inaction equivalent to a “no” vote—silence should mean stop, the same way it works in a pre-mission brief when someone doesn’t confirm ready.
Second, the “Gang of Eight” briefing model—where a handful of leaders get a call from the Secretary of State hours before bombs drop—is notification dressed up as oversight. Adult oversight means standing committees with real-time access to operational planning before the decision is made. Senator Mark Warner said it plainly: Trump’s characterization of the situation during the State of the Union didn’t match Warner’s understanding from classified briefings. That gap between the public narrative and the classified reality is exactly the kind of meaning divergence that my research on meaning repair identifies as a precursor to catastrophic institutional failure.
Third, and this is the harder one: we need to stop treating the rally-around-the-flag effect as a natural law and start treating it as a design vulnerability. The effect is real and short-lived—typically thirty days to two months, per Lian and Oneal’s 1993 findings. It is driven by the temporary absence of elite criticism and the surge of in-group identification. In a healthy system, that window closes quickly as oversight kicks in, media scrutiny deepens, and citizens process information. In a degraded system—one running on noise, bandwidth taxes, and a media environment optimized for engagement over accuracy—the window stays open long enough for the war to become irreversible.
The Korzybskian Gap will not close by itself. That’s the core argument of my research. Our tools for making war got faster. Our tools for deciding whether to go to war stayed slow. The brains tasked with making those decisions are running on fumes—taxed by noise, stressed by scarcity, herded into partisan cages that make nuanced thought feel like betrayal. Just read my article from The Inverse Problem: When a For-Profit Company Becomes America’s Last Guardrail Against Killer Robots.
What I Mean
I paid for the waffle. I left the diner. The TV was still running silent footage of smoke over Tehran.
Outside, the parking lot was full of people doing Saturday things. Getting gas. Loading groceries. Checking phones. None of them were on a map that included “major combat operations in Iran.” They were in the territory—the ordinary, ongoing territory of a country that is, at this moment, starting a war most of its citizens didn’t vote on, weren’t consulted about, and may not fully understand for weeks.
Frum sees the paradox. A brutal regime being struck by an untrustworthy president. An opportunity wrapped in a threat. He sees it clearly enough to name both poles.
What he misses—what almost no one in mainstream commentary catches—is the machine. The machine that allows one person to launch a war. The machine that converts rally effects into political cover. The machine that selects for leaders who exploit the gap between the speed of weapons and the speed of deliberation. The machine that treats the question “should we go to war” as a matter of presidential temperament rather than institutional architecture.
David Frum wrote an intelligent article about a dangerous man with too much power. I’m writing about the system that keeps handing the keys to whoever wins the cage match.
The Iranian people deserve freedom. American service members deserve a government that follows its own Constitution before putting their lives at risk. And all of us—every person whose life is shaped by decisions made at the speed of a cruise missile—deserve institutions designed for adults.
We’re not there yet. We’re adolescents with god-level tools and animal-level governance.
The question is whether we grow up before the next war, or because of it.
I’ve already lived through five tours of “because of it.” I’d like to try the other way.
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine combat engineer veteran, independent researcher, and author of the forthcoming The Adulthood of Humanity (2026). He writes What Time Binds on Substack.
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