That’s not true and uninformed. What even makes you believe this?
Europe has tons of top research universities. Both EU and China are competing with the US [0].
And this news is not an isolated event. The majority of Americans rank US higher education research and innovation as: poor [1]. US top universities are shrinking PhD programs [2.
The thing that makes the US unique is that they are really dropping the ball in a lot of areas, because of bad leadership of the financial and political “elite”.