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One month into the conflict in Iran, Trump's gut-instinct approach is not proving effective.
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The failure to learn from the past means that Donald Trump now faces a stark choice. If he can not 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
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