The article's Karim Khan example pretty deeply undercuts the thesis. Losing access to your bank account is the actual coercive power. Losing a Microsoft email is an inconvenience in comparison.
If your business has everything on GCP/AWS/Azure (which is very common) and the Americans choose to weaponinse US tech against your country or business, then unless you have non-US backups you are probably dead and all of your employees unemployed. If you are a state, all of your services and functions are probably dead and you have to rebuild from nothing. That is certainly true of my company and there are some mutterings starting where I am internally about worst case disaster recovery if suddenly one of these suppliers just disapeared.
In this new world you cannot trust that this will not happen. As a European relying on the Americans is honestly probably little better than relying on the Russians and probably on par with relying on the Chinese in terms of risk profile. Note we are actually for all intents and purposes at war with Russia.
The amount of leverage the Americans have over Europe is insane, and every captial should be trying to mitgate that risk asap.
Microsoft executives under oath said that they will not be able to honor those contracts if there is pressure from the US administration.
We should know this, but we keep forgetting: laws, contracts, courts etc always bow before political and military might.
In peacetime, we delude ourselves into thinking it aint so.
The situation is now clear as day. What op stated is 100 percent correct.
The US will have successfully invaded an EU country by 2027.
They will, if it comes to this, immediately and successfully weaponize all three hyperscalers.
It is abundantly clear where thinks are going.
If any country, organization or company is not prepared for this by mid 2026, they are blind and deaf
There are plenty banks owned and operated within the EU. One bank folded for US pressure but when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
That's not the case for digital infrastructure like Google Workspace, Google cloud, Office 365, AWS, etc.
When the US sanctioned Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2020, because of a law allowing extradition to China, no single bank was letting her open an account, including Chinese ones. She was receiving her salary fully in cash.
The EU compelling banks to do business despite US sanctions seems pretty unlikely even if relations continue to degrade.
> when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
>Losing a Microsoft email is an inconvenience in comparison.
Losing access to data is potentially worse than losing access to your bank account. I doubt Microsoft will let you grab a copy of all your emails after they block/ban you.
Unfortunately yes, and its the US that has choosen to do it. Its up to everyone else to recongise that it has already happened, or suffer the consequences if they choose not to respond.
the same folks that presided over catastrophic global warming, animal cruelty at industrial scales and human inequality i presume. maybe we can wind those back now theyre gone?
Probably yes at least to a certain level. At the moment to many countries are relying too heavily on a single point of failure, there should be independent alternatives so that is possible to have more and better competition and in case the administration of the current single point of failure goes nuts it's possible to switch over to something else.
I'll probably get downvoted for even suggesting this, but the EU should consider doing what Russia did (and one of the big reasons they are so resilient against sanctions): create own alternative banking protocol to SWIFT and VISA/Mastercard equiv. (MIR), own social networks (vkontact) and big tech (ozon, yandex, etc). EU seems to be actually okay on the datacenter front. Not sure how to handle the operating system and device side - too bad Nokia is dead. Certainly they have the talent, it's the consensus and will that's required. They really shouldn't have let American tech dominate there in the first place.
There's potentially coming a whole lot of European € back to the European market
The real 'military bases' are banks.
In this new world you cannot trust that this will not happen. As a European relying on the Americans is honestly probably little better than relying on the Russians and probably on par with relying on the Chinese in terms of risk profile. Note we are actually for all intents and purposes at war with Russia.
The amount of leverage the Americans have over Europe is insane, and every captial should be trying to mitgate that risk asap.
Microsoft executives under oath said that they will not be able to honor those contracts if there is pressure from the US administration. We should know this, but we keep forgetting: laws, contracts, courts etc always bow before political and military might. In peacetime, we delude ourselves into thinking it aint so.
The situation is now clear as day. What op stated is 100 percent correct.
The US will have successfully invaded an EU country by 2027.
They will, if it comes to this, immediately and successfully weaponize all three hyperscalers.
It is abundantly clear where thinks are going.
If any country, organization or company is not prepared for this by mid 2026, they are blind and deaf
That's not the case for digital infrastructure like Google Workspace, Google cloud, Office 365, AWS, etc.
The EU compelling banks to do business despite US sanctions seems pretty unlikely even if relations continue to degrade.
Microsoft relies on the EUs courts to recognise their property rights.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
Losing access to data is potentially worse than losing access to your bank account. I doubt Microsoft will let you grab a copy of all your emails after they block/ban you.
This is a very major inconvenience.
Monitoring of "hostile" workloads at datacentre scale is not going to work.
Should we throw away 80 years of trade, cooperation, and the resulting prosperity and go back into ridiculous tribalism?
All we can do is face the facts and pick up the pieces.
The US is already doing that, pretending otherwise is just hopeless naivete.