It's so cool that I used to read about Imperial Japan being sucked into an unwinnable forever war because it wasn't politically expedient to put it's foot down against its own colonial gendarmes and now I get to watch the US do the same in real time.
"history doesn't repeat but it rhymes" is honestly one of my favourite phrases bc of how concisely it encapsulates the dialectical materialist critique of metaphysical/cyclical models of history.
Indeed, there are similar trends, but there's also the dialectic at play where a new synthesis constantly emerges. It's just just the same thing repeating over and over.