Technically they could force root nameservers (based in the US) to intercept/proxy the whole gtld.
So all except n (netnod (EU)) and i (WIDE (JP))
So all except n (netnod (EU)) and i (WIDE (JP))
US could just drop the records for those.
The other reason is political. If they were to cut out eu or asia from the list then the risk of a split would increase massively. It would be suicide. If they did that people might even split internet further by splitting iana (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), in which case a computer in EU would be unable to communicate with an computer in US, and then the concept of a global internet would no longer exist. A split is a exceedingly dangerous concept.