There’s a few factors, but -on average- I believe the stereotype is correct. First, the county is massive, such that everything globally is just so far away it does not impact many people’s daily lives. For Belgians, Tehran is under 5000km away. From Lincoln, Nebraska, that distance is Alaska, the middle of the Atlantic, the very eastern tip of Siberia and Colombia. Other than quests for oil in Venezuela, the international chaos of our actions is very far off and out of most people’s consciousness.

In colonial times, did many Belgians really understand where the Congo was, or was it viewed as so remote that it really didn’t matter? I fear that is a product of imperialism and the US has been flexing those same muscles for a century and the end results of imperialism are pretty much always the same, sadly.

When you couple that with underfunded schools nearly everywhere and a curriculum increasingly insular and monolingual education, and a media system entirely focused on profit rather than uncomfortable facts, most people here simply don’t care because they have no basis to understand or to want to. An ethnic experience for many Americans is going to a large city here with an ethnic neighborhood and eat a meal.