Perhaps you meant that 01987 was the last year it was US-only? But vidarh pointed out above that the ARPANET was connected to NORSAR, a research center in Norway, in June 01973, and Norway is in Europe, so in fact our current internet has had some international connections for almost 49 years now.
ARPANET is not INTERNET
there were many network similar to ARPANET for scope (maybe not size, but Europe was politically much different back then and the wall in Berlin was still there) at the same time ARPANET was alive
Russians had their network too since the late 70s, and at one point they connected to the US directly even during the cold war years! (mid 80s).
> Perhaps you meant that 01987 was the last year it was US-only?
no, it was the year it became "a public accessible network", after NSFNET was established. The year later research centers in Europe were connected to it and were contributing to it.
ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990
The "Internet" as we know it was deployed as a research network in 1987, it was already connected to Europe research centers in 1988.
That's why WWW was born at CERN that was one of the largest nodes of the times.
The "user facing" Internet was deployed years later, globally in the west.