Americans will be shocked to learn that people in other countries don't walk around thinking about America or wondering what "the Americans" are going to do about stuff.
For example, a significant portion of Americans probably know basically nothing about France, and French government. France doesn't really affect their lives at all, and the mainstream news only mentions the country when a really major story happens.
But glancing at the front page of the Le Monde website, I see a story about Obama meeting with Netanyahu, a really interesting article about big data in American elections (with a lot about a tool called NationBuilder that I've never heard of), a blog about the search for extraterrestrial life that draws mainly from American research, and an article about Obama and Keystone XL.
There's a "Pixels" section full of American culture, with stuff about Fallout 4, YouTube stars, Microsoft, and an FBI hacking story.
A lot of this stuff could be considered "local" news; I'm not sure why anyone in France would care about Keystone XL.
Now obviously French people aren't walking around worrying about America, but in general, I think people in other countries know a lot more about us than we know about them. And that's not just because of the stereotypical ignorant American, the US just influences other countries more than they influence us.
I'd also observe that since the US has had such a large footprint, the interesting question isn't whether the French know our President, vs. whether an American can name the French Prime Minister. That doesn't scale properly, as it implies a standard by which the non-American wins by knowing one name, but the American has to know everyone. The more interesting question is does the average Japanese person know the name of France's Prime Minister, or vice versa? And that's staying comfortably within the world's top ten economies, hardly an unfair question. I suspect by this standard the US would look a lot less bad, though I would still be completely unsurprised to see it at the bottom of such a measure. It just wouldn't be such an extreme difference.
But I think it goes farther than French people knowing who Obama is. Yes, for every French article about Obama, there's an American article about some world leader. But French newspapers also have articles about a scandal at the University of Missouri, local police shooting stories, and again this Keystone stuff that frankly nobody should care about. US news doesn't carry that kind of story about other countries, because frankly I don't think anybody would care.
If I look at the Le Monde Americas section (http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/) I count 12 stories about the US in the last 4 days, the majority of which have very little relevance to the rest of the world. There's lots about Keystone, the University of Missouri racism scandal, the Seattle gum wall thing, etc.
I'm not saying Americans don't care about the rest of the world or that the news doesn't report on stuff outside our borders, but comparing US news about Europe to European news about the US is sort of proving my point. I think Europeans tend to know more about the US than Americans know about any one European country.
Also, this discussion is specifically focused on culture. I see maybe one or two culture-related articles on that NYTimes page, and pretty much no non-US articles in the Arts section. I think all the articles there about foreign artists are specifically about what they're doing in the US.
Whereas Le Monde, while of course it's focused on French culture, has Fallout 4, YouTube, a couple American art auctions, James Bond (maybe that's cheating though), Justin Bieber, and more. US culture is everywhere, and no one country or even continent gets that much space in American newspapers.
Finally, since I'm now realizing that picking a newspaper called "The World" might have biased my results, L'Express and Le Figaro seem to have similar amounts of American politics and culture.
I don't know any Americans who do that.
Why do you think that our democratically elected leaders feel so comfortable bombing, invading and murdering? They know much of the population ultimately feels that it is the US society's prerogative.
I can only name the Prime Minister of Australia because I have an Australian friend. I'd wager the average American isn't even aware Australia has a Prime Minister, let alone what his name is.
I agree that US citizens think we're the "center of the world". They get that idea because we know nothing about other countries yet they know a lot about us. Under the reasoning of "A king doesn't learn a peasants favorite color." people look at their ignorance in a positive light rather than a negative one.
I never gave a damn about US politics until I started travelling internationally and having more international friends than national ones. It was embarrassing to speak about US politics and have someone from Australia know more about my countries internal politics than I did.
Edit:
I think a large part of this is that many countries are bilingual. Learning a second language is especially common and probably the most common language is English. Meaning they can actually read our local news. Meanwhile, few people in the U.S actually speak French/German beyond what they learned in a few years of high school.
