Do European and American liberals advocate different policies, or is it just that the political spectrum in both places is different so the same policies appear at different relative positions?

FWIW, in Australia, there are two main political parties, Liberal and Labor. The Liberals are reasonably close to the Republicans (from what I can glean of US politics), and "liberals" (US meaning) seem to align with Labor or one of the other parties.

is there a way to get markdown to work with links that end in parentheses

A backslash in front of the offending punctuation should fix it.