If it were ever true that we Americans are provincial — the charge made by European elites and pundits — it no longer is. True, only about one-in-three American adults have passports, but then Europeans can drop in on neighboring countries by hopping on a train, whereas Americans face a longer, more expensive trip from a country large enough to accommodate a great deal of wanderlust.

If the current recession taught Americans, and especially those of our policymakers capable of absorbing new facts, anything, it taught that events in “ a far away country … [with] people of whom we know nothing,” to borrow from Neville Chamberlain’s description of Czechoslovakia, matter here at home. Guerrillas in Niger disrupt oil production and American drivers pay more for gasoline; Greece teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, and U.S. bankers nervously reexamine their exposure to sovereign debt and European holders of those IOUs; China manipulates its currency and the undervalued yuan sucks jobs across the Pacific; floods in Afghanistan and drought in Russia cut those countries’ cotton production and American farmers benefit from the consequent rise in prices.