Some old truths about warfare have been knocking on the door of the Oval Office in the month since US President Donald Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent US and Israeli warplanes to bomb Iran.
The failure to learn from the past means that Donald Trump now faces a stark choice. If he cannot get a deal with Iran, he can either try to declare a victory that will fool no one, or escalate the war.
The oldest of the old truths comes from the Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke the Elder: no plan survives first contact with the enemy. He was writing in 1871, the year Germany was unified as an empire, a moment that was as consequential for the security of Europe as this war might be for the security of the Middle East.
Maybe Trump prefers the boxer Mike Tyson's modern version: everyone has a plan until they get hit. Even more relevant for Trump are the words of one of his predecessors, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American general who commanded the D-Day landings in 1944 and went on to serve two terms as a Republican president of the United States in the 1950s.
Eisenhower's version was plans are worthless, but planning is everything. He meant that the discipline and process of making plans to fight a war make it possible to change course when the unexpected happens.
For Trump, the unexpected item has been the resilience of the regime in Iran. It seems that he was hoping for a repeat of the US military's lightning-fast kidnap in January of the President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. They are now in prison in New York, facing trial. Maduro's deputy Delcy Rodríguez replaced him as president and is taking orders from Washington.
Hoping for a repeat of the victory over Maduro suggests a yawning lack of comprehension of the differences between Venezuela and Iran.
Eisenhower's adage on thinking ahead came in a speech in 1957. He had been the man in charge of planning and commanding the largest amphibious military operation in history, the invasion of western Europe on D-Day, so he knew what he was talking about.
He went on to explain that when an unexpected emergency arises the first thing you do is to take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven't been planning you can't start to work, intelligently at least.
Far from capitulating or collapsing after Israel and the US killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first airstrike of the war, the regime in Tehran is functioning and fighting back. It is playing a weak hand well.
In contrast, Trump has given the impression that he is making it up as he goes along. He follows gut instincts, not the pages of intelligence and strategic advice that other presidents have ploughed through.
Four weeks ago, Trump and Netanyahu put their faith in a ferocious bombing campaign that killed not just the supreme leader but his closest advisors and has so far resulted in the deaths of 1,464 Iranian civilians, according to HRANA, a US-based group that monitors human rights violations in Iran.
The Iranian regime is an obdurate, ruthless, well-organized adversary. Founded after the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah, it was then forged in the deadly misery of the eight-year war with Iraq. The regime is built on institutions, not individuals, and reinforced by iron-clad religious beliefs and an ideology of martyrdom. That means that killing leaders, while undoubtedly shocking and disruptive, does not become a death sentence for the regime.
The Iranian regime could not hope to match the firepower of the US and Israel, but like Moltke, Tyson and Eisenhower, it has been making plans. It broadened the war, attacking its Gulf Arab neighbors as well as American bases on their territory and Israel, spreading the pain as widely as possible.
As America and Israel face the consequences of a conflict with Iran, the implications of Trump's instinctive approach may lead to dangerous escalations and economic turmoil, with potential ramifications for global stability.
