A shared quality that defined the greatness of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt was that during the darkest days of World War I, when victory was still far from certain, they were willing and able to plan 30, 40 and even 50 years ahead.
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Both men, who had first hand experience of the "war to end all wars" 20 years earlier, knew the herculean efforts being made by their peoples would come to nought if the allies won the war but lost the peace.
Thanks to this insight the cessation of hostilities in 1945 marked the beginning of what must surely be the most magnanimous treatment of defeated foes in all of recorded history. Japan and West Germany were reconstituted as working democracies and the devastated nations of Western Europe and Asia were rebuilt with American aid.
It was a massive investment in future peace and prosperity that is still paying dividends more than 70 years later.
Roosevelt, Churchill and their immediate successors knew it was as important to establish a rule of law amongst nations as it was to have it for their own citizens.
They, unlike George W. Bush who prematurely declared "Mission accomplished" on Iraq in 2003, and Donald Trump, who is on the cusp of doing the same thing over Islamic State in Syria, would have been very wary about precipitous troop withdrawals and economic and political disengagement.
Yes, it is heartening the military arm of IS has been all but stamped out with hundreds of its fighters throwing down their arms in Baghouz, on the banks of the Euphrates, in recent days. The evil "caliphate", which once controlled 88,000 square kilometres of territory stretching from western Syria to eastern Iraq, and which ruled over almost eight million people, is no more.
The downside is that once the celebrations are done and the US troops who have been supporting the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Force have gone home things may even get worse.
It is unlikely the SDF's Autonomous Administration of North East Syria will last long given Turkey, a US ally, intends to invade the area to smash the Kurds who have passed laws guaranteeing gender equality and religious freedom.
This will strengthen the grip of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and create a Kurdish insurgency which likely find itself fighting the Turks, Assad's forces and the now underground IS network all at once.
Is this really what victory looks like?
The only way to truly eradicate IS is to defeat the evils that brought it into being and then allowed it to spread. Those evils are ignorance, hatred, poverty, intolerance, inequality and injustice.
We have known since World War II that the best way to guarantee peace is to build a better world. This means countries such as Australia, which has cut almost a billion dollars from its foreign aid budget since 2015, need to rethink their approach.
We do not exist in isolation. If we aren't willing to share our prosperity and prove the worth of our value systems others will fill the vacuum with competing ideologies or fundamentalist hate speech.
While Trump is no FDR and Morrison is no Menzies, surely they can learn from the lessons of history.
