Visa Waiver (ESTA) and Advance Passenger Information (API/APIS) are not the same thing. Even with a visa waiver you (via the airline) must provide API before check-in, and may subsequently be denied boarding, denied entry at your destination, or in extreme cases return of your flight to it's origin mid-flight.
My point was that with VWP the US doesn't have the opportunity to do an entrance check at the time of visa issue, as there isn't one. This covers most of Western Europe, Australia, NZ, and Japan AFAIK.
I did some quick searching to see what the obverse situation is -- what countries US nationals can visit without first obtaining a visa. There's no convenient listing I could find.
And this doesn't mean I find the US APIS to be an unordained Good Thing[tm]. Some border controls are necessary, yes. However US immigration policy has more than a small amount of irrationality to it. And pretty much always has (Asian Exclusion Act, etc.).
Right, citizens of most "western" countries can visit other such countries (typically for tourism or business up to 3 months) without a visa. And until APIS became technologically viable, "without a visa" meant that the host country was pretty much waiving the opportunity to perform a background check on you.
But these days, the US runs some kind of check on everyone. So that's the equivalent of being one of those "unfriendly" countries that requires visas for all noncitizens. (I guess Australia does too, since it requires non-visa visitors to apply in advance for something called an Electronic Travel Authority.)
