What are my chances for admission to the top US university?

I am an 18 year old highschooler from the Central European country with a strong interest in applying to the US university for physics programe. I would like to ask you about my chances of getting admitted to the undergrad college in the US.

What I can tell about myself:

My "GPA" in scale from 1 to 5 is around 4.25. Mostly importantly, I did a kind of "Science Fair" research in Lattice QCD in cooperation with physicists from our local top university, which was then published in Physical Review D journal.

Concerning all above, and probably some recommendation letters from real scientists, what are my chances for the universities like Cornell, UChicago, Stanford, MIT an Princeton?

Of course I can give it a try, but admission processes to the US universities are very different than those in Europe. It will take a lot of time, energy and money.

I'm particularly thinking about two "tracks":

1. Try admission to the US university. In case of failure i will chose track 2, but I will lost about 1500$, which can be handy for admission to the grad-school.

2. Go to our university, continuing doing a research with publications, and do my best, like trying to have an internship at CERN/BNL, have a good GPA and then apply to the top grad-school.

Which path in my case is better?