In the last century, the US homeland suffered a terrible foreign attack at Pearl Harbor, and again on 9/11. Each time, the American response changed the world order. But that’s about it. Add on a few smaller terrorist atrocities, and the total death toll from foreign action on US soil these past 100 years is somewhere under 6,000. The Bosnian town of Srebrenica lost more people in a single Serb massacre in 1995.
The US inhabits a gated mansion in the safest neighbourhood in geopolitics. Even if the Red Army had rolled across western Europe, life in Alabama or Ohio would have been almost undisturbed. It’s telling that when Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, he had to invent a foreign bogeyman, the Mexican rapist. The US is immune to the world in a way that British Brexiters can only fantasise about. This means that the American election probably matters more to foreigners than it does to most Americans. The US president has the power to protect the rest of the world, mess us up or simply ignore us.
No country can exist in glorious isolation, but the US very nearly can. Long before this election campaign, it was already retreating from a pesky world. Barack Obama has spent eight years trying to ditch the global policeman’s baton – although, as Xenia Wickett of Chatham House notes, he didn’t bother to explain his policy and therefore this was often interpreted simply as weakness. Trump offers a grotesque caricature of American isolationism, but even presuming Hillary Clinton wins, the US has lost its urge to meddle in faraway countries of which it knows nothing.