Has America forgotten the lessons of the 1960s?

Those of us who lived through the 1960s and 1970s should be forgiven for feeling incredulous right now. We learned valuable lessons back then, about war, energy security, the environment and racial justice. Now, we are making the same mistakes we made before, as though the past taught us nothing. 

Nearly half the members of Congress and President Trump should know better, because they were alive in those years, too. 

I wrote recently about how Trump’s warring in Iran ignores what we learned from the war in Vietnam. We paid a heavy price for those lessons: 58,281 soldiers killed or missing, more than 300,000 wounded or injured, and as many as 3.4 million dead Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

We also learned hard lessons about America’s oil addiction. Our economy, lifestyles and household budgets are vulnerable to outside actors: oil-producing countries that manipulate prices, as well as enemies capable of closing any of the eight major choke points through which the world’s oil shipments must pass. Even in peacetime, the U.S. spends as much as $132 billion annually to keep the waterways open. 

Then, like now, Iran and Israel were major factors in America’s oil crises. But rather than reducing our oil dependence, Trump appears to covet other countries’ reserves. Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves; Iran’s are third largest. Axios notes that Trump is “positioning himself as a central architect of Iran’s post-war future” and “signaling ambitions that extend beyond military action into reshaping Iran’s political and economic order just as he did in Venezuela.”

Another lesson from 60 years ago is the threat of unregulated pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency recounts, “For years, raw sewage, industrial and........

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