missing WMD expert is found dead!

I think there's a much more general theory in this, even - it sure sounds like it makes a lot of sense.

I mean, variations of this process can be seen in so many different contexts, in different countries: for every wave of modernisation that opens up a society to the wider, bigger, as you say, more complicated world, full of intimidating differences, opportunities and unfamiliar challenges, there's a virulent backlash that enables people to cling to certainties and shut out the scary world.

You could probably fit much of the upsurge of nationalism and ethni-cism of post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the same theory. When everything changes and gets called in question by wholly new horizons, people will grasp at boundaries and delimitations that cut the horizon back to a less intimidating size, yeh. People are willing to fight and kill for that.

I remember one of the lucky things about my childhood was that I was uprooted several times and lived in different cultures (The Hague, I think I mentioned). The first time I came back to the US, though I was only 11, I recognized that I was now permanently "different."

It was a good kind of different, not damaging. Had more experiences to draw on. I'm most certainly far from being the only American kid who had that kind of experience, and if I were to dictate an upbringing for all American kids, it would include -- without fail -- time overseas in another language, another culture. We have fallen into the trap, in this country, of knowing only ourselves. It has bred a kind of narcissism which has contributed to many of the problems we're seeing now -- the misperceptions and misunderstandings, the xenophobia and defensiveness, and the paranoia. We think we embrace "the future," but I don't think we even begin to understand (much less accept) what that future will demand: that we know "the others" as well as we know ourselves.

Americans are isolated and unexposed.

This seems to me to be very true. I have often been struck by the insularity of many Americans, even of those who consider themselves to be educated. There is a crippling lack of awareness.
Ignorance can lead to indifference, and a lot of less desirable things, like assumption of superiority, arrogance, and also xenophobia.