Yes but NIST holds requests for crypto standards that are used widely around the world. As far as I know there's no requirement that the algorithm be created in the United States to be considered, but I'm not entirely sure about the process.

It seems to me that if the standard was better, faster, and more secure, then it would become the greater standard by merit. Unfortunately there's been a shadow on NIST since Dual_EC_DRBG was "pushed" through. I would like to think it's greater mission is still intact.

Rijndael (which is better known by the name AES) was developed by Belgian cryptographers, working in Europe. I think the same team developed Keccak (SHA-3).

For some additional context:

Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen are the co-designers of AES. Later, they collaborated with Gilles Van Assche and Michaël Peeters to design NOEKEON for the NESSIE competition [1]; simultaneously Rijmen worked with Paulo S. L. M. Barreto to design the WHIRLPOOL hash function [2], which became a NESSIE recommendation.

Daemen, Van Assche, and Peeters were joined by Guido Bertoni to create the hash function RadioGatún [3] from Daemen and Craig Clapp's old stream cipher PANAMA [4]. The same team refined the design into Keccak [5], a 'sponge function' primitive they invented [6] that forms the basis of SHA-3.

[1] http://gro.noekeon.org/ [2] http://www.larc.usp.br/~pbarreto/WhirlpoolPage.html [3] http://radiogatun.noekeon.org/ [4] http://radiogatun.noekeon.org/panama/panamadc.pdf [5] http://keccak.noekeon.org/TheRoadFromPanamaToKeccak.pdf [6] http://sponge.noekeon.org/