Europe - where many countries have lower drinking ages - has limitations on the types of alcohol you can get at a bar depending on age IIRC. Furthermore, alcohol is so embedded into many European cultures (e.g Italian, German, French) that you’re taught from a young age how to moderate your consumption. That’s not to say that alcohol isn’t bad for you, but it is to say that binge drinking (4-6+ drinks a day/night) isn’t necessarily the norm in those countries.

In the United States alcohol is more of an issue because: 1) public transportation isn’t the norm unless you’re in a metropolitan area and even then traffic is a huge problem (e.g NYC traffic, SF traffic, etc.) so people are more likely to drink and drive simply because personal cars are the norm, not any specific cultural aspect, leading to our drinking age laws which were passed during the Reagan Era and tied to highway funding, and 2) drinking is tacitly included in the mythical triad of “drugs, sex, and rock n roll” that so horrified the adult generations; in other words, underage drinking in American cultures is taboo which makes it even more desirable to teenagers who are continuously told what they can’t do (i.e sex, drinking, drugs, etc.) and it’s seen as a rite of passage to drink when you’re young. Binge drinking is also a big thing in America and one needs only to look at college/frat culture to affirm this making it more likely to become a problem for Americans than other nationalities who may not be as prone to excess.

All this is to say that the United States is a country that has many characteristics that lend themselves to things like alcoholism. Of course, alcoholism exists outside of the US and it always has but I think there’s certain particularities (cultural, economic, social, political, etc.) that make it that much more of problem there than anywhere else. It’s similar to obesity in that way where there are certainly other countries with significant obese populations but the economics and accessibility of incredibly unhealthy but cheap fast food + giant portions make the US more of an obesity hotspot.