The idea that America is an isolationist country, cut off from the rest of the world, insular and atavistic, is just plain baloney.
A list of the alliances, treaties and international bodies to which the United States is party would be a very long one indeed. There is, for instance, NATO—which despite periodic American (and European) grousing is the most successful and long-lived political/military alliance in modern history. And NATO is in addition to a large number of mutual defense treaties with countries including Australia, Japan and South Korea.
Insofar as trade is concerned, the United States is the reverse of autarkic. To take a single example, in 2016 goods and services trade between the US and Canada was valued at US $627.8 billion. (US exports of $320.1 billion; US imports of $307.6 billion). Despite occasional grousing (and Trump tweets), this reciprocal trade relationship is far too important to both countries to be abandoned. And it’s replicated in US trade relationships with numerous other countries, including Mexico, the UK, France, etc.
The claim that the US is “isolationist” tends to crop up when this country does something that the EU & etc. don’t like. A good example was the US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. There were many valid reasons for the Trump Administration’s decision, chief among them the fact that the accord was heavily tilted against the interests of the United States. At the very moment when America stood on the verge of true energy independence, the Paris accord demanded wholly unrealistic carbon dioxide reductions that made no scientific of economic sense. I’m no Trump fan, but he did the right thing there. Only the United States, it seems, is expected to decide against its national interests for the sake of that comical abstraction, the world community.
As for immigration, it seems to have escaped many people’s notice that the supposedly enlightened immigration policies of supposedly open and welcoming European countries have produced quite the backlash. In Sweden, population 10 million, 400,000 mostly Middle Eastern migrants have been admitted, with baneful effects of the welfare system and the crime rate. Recently it was revealed that there are in Sweden almost sixty no-go zones, populated largely by migrants, where the police fear to tread and the writ of Swedish law no longer runs. Violence against women is on the increase. The mainstream political parties have resolutely refused to acknowledge the problem, with the result that a populist right-wing party is steadily gaining electoral ground. Mention might also be made of the horrifying upsurge of violent anti-Semitism in France, almost all of it perpetrated by North African immigrants. So maybe questioning the orthodoxies of open-border immigration isn’t such a bad idea.
I well remember the benighted attempt to force the metric system on an uninterested country. It was a project beloved of elite opinion but despite much hype and many prophecies of doom if we didn’t go metric, people simply ignored the propaganda and continued to think in terms of pounds, inches, etc. And as things turned out, the US economy was perfectly capable of adapting itself to a dual system of weights and measures. The main result of the push for metric was to exacerbate the nation’s obesity problem by saddling America with two-liter pop bottles.
It’s probably true that people in Flyover Country USA pay little attention to what’s going on in Belgium or Cambodia or the Congo Republic. But after all, people in Britain, Germany or Sweden show very little interest in what goes on in Rhode Island, or Indiana, or North Dakota.
I would just add that branding people who decline to support one’s own ideas as racist, xenophobic, racist, etc. and so forth, is hardly likely to make one’s case. Indeed, it’s a glaring symptom of a closed, intolerant mind.
