They do - other countries. Which I guess begs a follow-up question: why aren't they more outward-looking? This is the question the article asks halfway through

They do - other countries. Which I guess begs a follow-up question: why aren't they more outward-looking? This is the question the article asks halfway through, but it still ends without much of an answer. As someone living in Ireland, where many things are of similar low quality (e.g. healthcare), we are outward-looking but only in one specific way: we look toward the US for a lot of things. I've often asked this question in a different way: why do we look to the US and not elsewhere (e.g. the UK, France, other EU states, where healthcare is actually ok). The two answers I've come up with are anglophone bias and anti-English sentiment arising out of our history, only one of which applies to the US, and yet they definitely don't look too us, to Canada, to other anglophone countries. So I suspect I'm wrong on this explanation in both cases... It's likely a very multifaceted answer.