History doesn't always repeat itself, or even rhyme. People sometimes learn from experience, their own or others'.

Example: Woodrow Wilson, a stubborn Southerner, refused to involve any Republicans, all Northerners in those days, in treaty negotiations after World War I. His treaty version, which would require the United States to go to war on a vote of the League of Nations, was rejected by the Senate.

Franklin Roosevelt, who had been Wilson's assistant secretary of the Navy, included Republicans in post-war and treaty planning while World War II was still going on. That ensured bipartisan support for the United Nations, where America had a veto in the Security Council that authorizes war, and paved the way for bipartisan support of the Marshall Plan and the NATO Treaty – a post-war settlement that has lasted nigh on 80 years.

But are current leaders capable of learning from past mistakes? As the formidable learned historian Niall Ferguson wrote on February 28, as the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran, "For the habitual critics of U.S. foreign policy in general and Donald Trump's in particular, the analogy between today's air raids against Iran and the invasion of Iraq nearly 23 years ago is too obvious to be resisted."

As for public opinion, such critics expected history to be repeated. There would be a familiar refrain, dating back to protests against Democratic presidents' 1960s escalations in Vietnam – the "traditional model: Rally-around-the-flag, then quagmire and backlash," as the brilliant polling analyst Nate........

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