Technically, yes. The US government could directly change DNS entries for ccTLDs in the root zone (or sign alternate versions and use them for hacking).
However, that would be the nuclear option. And I guess most countries would see that as an act of war.
Creating alternate DNS roots isn't very hard.
So just like the US is technically capable of launching missiles in the direction of North Korea, but doesn't do it. It is very unlike that the US would directly mess with ccTLDs.
From a security point of view, locally installing trust anchors for all ccTLDs would be a good idea though.
That's an interesting point that you shouldn't credit me for making; I was just implying that other countries will also have arbitrary rules about what lives under their ccTLDs.
Yes, but you would have to comply with one set of rules instead of with the rules of the US as well. For example, in the Rojadirecta case, a Spanish .es domain would have avoided interference by the US. So that's why I consider local ccTLD domains better than gTLDs.
If the question is whether the US would be a good steward of international domains or other international aspects of the Internet, then the USG has proven that it cannot be trusted.
I'm not saying that any other government would do better, but the new structure reduces (at least in theory) the influence of governments to almost zero and puts oversight in the hand of the Internet community. For better or worse, the Internet community seems to have a better track record than the US government.
