Yeah, it’s kinda weird until you start thinking about how it came to be.

Ww2. That’s where it came about. Once the US jumped in directly, the rise to being the focus of global interactions was inevitable. It wasn’t that the US was something special (though you’d find people that think otherwise), it was simply not having had the worst of the fighting on our lands.

Europe took decades to really recover fully, with the rest of the world not having the resources to step onto the world stage, much less handle the reins of international interdependency that became necessary.

The Soviet Union was the only other nation that could have done it, but they were already not popular with most of Europe, and didn’t have enough connections elsewhere to overwhelm the new cross-Atlantic alliances.

So we got the cold war. Which led to a US centric hegemony.

When that’s in play, everyone is going to pay attention to the politics of that central nation. Doesn’t matter if you’re opposed to a world power, you damn well have to pay attention to it.

Then, since American politics started moving more and more public with radio and television, the politicians became easier to have a surface level grasp of. So it follows that the well known politicians would be the point of comparison

And it isn’t only us politicians, though it’s definitely the majority since Thatcher left office and the EU has become more famous as a whole than individual leaders.

I can’t say any of it is good or bad. But I can say that any other country in the same situation, with the resources to apply to building the kind of connections the US did, would be drawing the same kind of comparisons. I think it would be less likely if the USSR had built a different network of alliances, or if China succeeds in building their hegemony the way they seem to want. I don’t think you’d see legislators and bureaucrats being famous the way senators from here can be, but you can bet that the people in line to be in the top spots would draw similar attention, if not the same level of awareness of what they really represent as part of their national drive.

It really is a trip. Here in the states, most people couldn’t tell you what Macron, or Trudeau, or Scholz represent politically, and we should. Starmer is kinda too new to have a grip on yet. But, there’s even people that aren’t very aware of anything Putin or Xi Jinping represent beyond them existing, and everyone should have at least that basic awareness, no matter where they are, based on current states of the world.

Notice all the nations I didn’t include their leader? It wasn’t disrespect, but I’m just not up on everyone that’s a leader, much less the less visible roles, and I should be. But, being real, those are the countries that most impact the US, so that’s where I tend to focus more. Nobody can keep track of everywhere, and if they aren’t in the news, keeping track is difficult, even with English friendly sources.

But the US? It’s still the center of the western wheel. Good or bad, that’s how it currently is, so people pay extra attention.