did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?

No, you don’t throw your eggs into a basket when the basket is foo far away.

It’s quite the other way round. Imagine the North American continent drifting away from all other continents at the same time, and at an increasing speed.

This hasn’t been caused by the orange problem. It was observable several years earlier. But when they decided to afford their orange problem for the first time, it increased the speed significantly. And now it is increasing again, and both speed and acceleration increase.