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 Feb. 28, as 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 Silver puts it.

Trump clearly wanted to avoid that trap. He’s plainly unfamiliar with the people’s great success in reviving dormant traditions of electoral democracy and rule of law in post-World War II Germany and Japan, and he spent most of this century decrying George W. Bush’s attempts to nurture such plants in the less fertile soil of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As did Roosevelt, he has taken a different course, in his removal of Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela and in the bombing of Iran, which resulted in the deaths of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several dozen regime leaders.

One reason he could do so was precision bombing. Massive bombing didn’t produce regime change in Churchill’s Britain or Hitler’s Germany, but bombs were famously inaccurate. Five decades later, technology facilitated precision bombing. In 1991, Iraqis strolled along the banks of the Tigris River, confident that the bombs released from George H. W. Bush’s Desert Storm planes would fall on buildings hosting Saddam’s entourage and regime loyalists.

Electronic surveillance — which will not surprise viewers of Apple TV’s Israeli-made streaming series “Tehran” — has enabled the precision location of regime leaders, ushering in U.S. special forces to extract Maduro from his safe room in Caracas and Israeli and American jets to zero in on Khamenei and the supreme leader’s colleagues in their Saturday morning conference.