On the eve of what was ludicrously called Operation Iraqi Freedom, I was a teenager in Boise, Idaho, protesting in front of the state Capitol with the Idaho Green Party, a scattering of mostly Gen X neo-hippies. It was, in retrospect, an incredibly dismal time to cut one’s teeth as any kind of anti-war activist. Though there were mass worldwide demonstrations—larger than even the Vietnam war protests, everyone involved kept pointing out—the war machinery churned on. In March 2003, the United States bombed Baghdad and launched a ground invasion based on a lie; the next year, George W. Bush was elected to his second term.

Bush, we knew, was incompetent, entirely unqualified. He had lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and waged an illegal war against the caution of the international community. He was a legacy-admission president who had lost the popular vote in 2000. He couldn’t pronounce “nuclear” and was a hapless puppet for hawks like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice.

Being old enough to have once bought, in earnest, a Rock Against Bush compilation CD is to feel a certain sense of déjà vu in the Trump era. Perhaps it is this sensation of recent history repeating itself that has led the public to adopt a kind of low-grade apathy concerning foreign policy, at least for the time being. According to a Washington Post dispatch from Iowa this month, voters are apprehensive about the prospect of war with Iran but not particularly interested in talking about it.

That isn’t to say that war is popular. Though current attitudes about military escalation with Iran are varied, nearly two decades after Republicans shoehorned “freedom fries” onto the congressional cafeteria menu, the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq are largely considered costly foreign policy blunders among civilians and veterans alike. And as military operations in the Middle East have dragged on, conditions at home have deteriorated. Today, student debt has surpassed $1.5 trillion, 27.5 million people lack health care, and the richest 1 percent of the population owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Political inequality has also reached stultifying levels: A prominent 2014 study by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page estimated that economic elites so disproportionately influence politics that the effect of the average citizen on policymaking is now essentially zero; a more recent analysis by another team of researchers found that congressional representatives have almost no idea what their own constituents even want.

In this depressing landscape, there may very well be the seeds of an anti-war effort capable of thwarting new interventions in the Middle East—which is to say, accomplishing what we couldn’t in 2003. Even as the threat of open war appears to have temporarily subsided, building a broadly popular, working-class coalition that can effectively oppose future escalations remains a critical project.