If you want to do a PhD, DO NOT limit yourself to your home country. Many countries simply are not capable of properly training researchers. The US can. China mostly can by now, I expect. Northern Europe can, to some degree, in some fields. Elsewhere, you are at risk of wasting important years of your life.
Trump might end US dominance, but the general point that academia is international and entire countries can simply not have a functioning pipeline for new researchers.
> Elsewhere, you are at risk of wasting important years of your life.
Unfortunately, as a 5th year PhD student in the US at a tier-1 STEM research university I'm disappointed to say: students here are very very very much at risk. I can't compare to universities in Europe, but I can say OP's story is the story of most students I know.
While I personally know a solid handful of exceptions, don't expect the US to meaningfully avoid what the OP describes. Regardless of country or university, your advisor is the ultimate decider of whether or not you will be a doll for them to "play scientist" with or be pushing the boundaries of science.
Of the exceptions I do know, while they are intelligent, it was not their intelligence or work ethic that allowed them to be exceptions.
Europe can etc. FTFY.
And since with such decision one frequently sort of selects where they will reside afterwards (ie by finding partner and settling down), its also about choosing a society one wants to grow older and potentially raise kids in.
We all have our preferences but me personally I would never choose US for such, even when disregarding current admin excesses (which in some form are not going away, its the new norm and don't hold your breath for next election cycle).
This applies to the UK and Germany, for example, not just Eastern Europe. There are certainly spots of excellence, but even among high quality UK universities, very often PhD training is on the "apprenticeship" model where you're just thrown into research without graduate-level courses. You can judge the result by looking at the proportion of US-trained staff in EU departments.