Ever since Marilyn Monroe’s less famous namesake, James, came up with his Doctrine almost two centuries ago, America has toyed with isolationism. They tried it in the First World War, and it didn’t work. They tried it in the Second World War, and it didn’t work. And Barack Obama has spent his presidency unsuccessfully trying to raise the drawbridge to the Middle East.

But there is a bit of isolationism going on at the moment that is not catching everybody’s eye: Tax Isolationism.

As the nation fires its engines for the four-yearly circus that is the Presidential Election, candidates for the Republican nomination are outdoing each other in unpassable and unworkable tax reform proposals. Meanwhile, the nominee-presumptive for the Democratic ticket has made her own comments on the issue.

What is remarkable is that all the candidates have concentrated on lowering tax rates and closing loopholes, conjuring up numbers they each know they will not have to justify. After all, America is one of the few countries in the world where the Government’s Budget is a wish-list rather than a statement of intent (Congress never passes Budgets as proposed). They are looking at America as if it were a self-contained island. Their sole material tip of the hat to other countries is the universal objection to inversion transactions, which have been rife in recent years and serve to reduce the US tax base.

In the meantime, BEPS is fast taking shape, and the US Treasury is belatedly realizing that, as European nations apply the rules and import more profit to their shores, in a zero-sum game the big loser is the U.S. of A. which is by far the busiest player in the international economy.

The big question now is whether the US will try and torpedo part of the BEPS program. At this late stage that would not go down well internationally. As regards automatic exchange of information, America may end up trailing much of the world since the Federal authorities evidently have limited legal right to demand States’ statistics.

On the other hand,  America’s antithetical view to John Donne’s meditation, ‘No man is an island,’ may not be all bad. As Mrs Arthur Miller herself once observed, ‘If I’d obeyed all the rules, I’d never have got anywhere’.