Then won’t foreign governments just ban freedom.gov? This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.
The US government is responsible for 35% of Tor's funding[1] and has been its primary sponsor since Tor was invented as a side project in the US Naval Research Lab.
I'm not saying things will return to the pre-Trump semi-hegemony but I do think it's over the top to think the US economy will have zero soft power in the years after Trump too.
That surely is running out of steam. Everyone's got whiplash from trying to watch America and it's tariffs. How do you know it won't be applied anyway, or forgiven for whatever flavour of the day policy it changes to.
There is very little point in conceding to it when you'll have another opportunity for something else that might be more amicable before the inks dry on that tariff.
Reciprocal tariffs would (for the EU) hurt export of goods much more, since that is where the EU has a large surplus.
Are they though? Trump tried to use them to get ownership of Greenland a few weeks ago and just gave up. Then he tried to bully Canada again, and also gave up again. I think at this point nobody takes his offers of relief or threats seriously anymore, since any deal you make can be invalidated a couple weeks later.
I am saying we have seen multiple instances where countries have stopped considering Trump's deals, cause they cannot be relied on.
We don't care any more. We don't like you. Do you understand?
If the US wants to ban AWS from operating in the EU that's just going to accelerate the shift away, for example.
Tarriffs are a tax on imports to the US applied by the US government.
You can't tarriff selling a service overseas, in fact since AWS in other countries is a locally incorporated entity you can't even meaningfully demand they charge more AWS in the UK is a separate corporation incorporated and taxed under UK law, for example.
My point was that tarriffs or other trade sanctions on Europe are hardly going to change the calculus or consumption of services by Europe - the most that could be done is accelerate the migration away, but European consumers wouldn't notice a thing by those mechanisms (because US digital services are an import - "kind of" - given actual corporate structures).
If it ends with the Navy showing its non-soft power, Europe won't have any fucks left to give about some website.
I suspect most Americans would actually be quite supportive.
You’ll just have to figure out how to actually pay for it.
The defense budget required to operate without US assistance is another matter entirely; you’re looking at doubling existing spending, plus hundreds of billions in one-off procurement costs — and that assumes ongoing access to US weapons systems.
The US subsidizes the massive weapons development programs you currently rely on; cost sharing agreements and unit purchases do not come close to offsetting the full sunk R&D costs the US covers.
Replacing those weapons programs, and the existing US industrial base and supply chain they depend on, would run into the trillions of dollars.
Just the R&D portion of the US defense budget is $150B a year — the entire EU’s aggregate defense R&D spending is only ~€15B/year.
A truly independent EU that did not depend on the US for its security would be a very different place.
Probably worth noting that if the US isn’t at the head of the table, it’s moved to China by default, not Europe. Though their propaganda seems to be quite successful lately.
Don't you understand? You're threatening to invade us, China isn't. So no matter how bad China may be, you're still worse at the moment.
You're so blinded by arrogance. You cannot imagine a world in which you are hated, but it's already here.
Netflix, YouTube and OpenAI are completely meaningless and we could drop it tomorrow. NVIDIA and AWS are a different story. The only problem is that once things become transactional (as opposed to mutually trusting allies), Europe can leverage ASML and possibly ARM. So it doesn’t bring much soft power anymore, only mutually assured economic destruction.
I don’t think it’s meant to be a perfect solution; I think it’s meant to be a political tool.
Also, the US does fund Tor — originally US Navy + DARPA, now through Dept of State. Entirely possible that they’ll eventually operate a Tor onion site for freedom.gov too.
When the US issues reports saying the EU is actively working against US values both within the US and globally, that report can be elevated by later US administrations to justify military drawdowns, exiting NATO, etc. The EU should produce counter artifacts demonstrating they do align with US values, but instead they responded as if this was a power struggle.
Your comment about “mind games” suggests too simple an interpretation:
This isn’t about what people believe is true, but what facts are available to the machinery of government policy making — much like litigating semantics and debating evidence inclusion within a court case.
This is about constructing the sentence:
“The EU’s widespread blocking of the freedom.gov free speech platform for the past decade demonstrates a divergence from American values that means NATO no longer functions as an effective vehicle for American vision on the global stage.”
Also it is cheap, easy, non-controversial domestically in the US, and ethically coherent with American values.
Do you mean that VPN will blur the nipples when you watch pictures of classical paintings through it?
No, it means they will send a SWAT team to your house if you use it to download a movie.
I don't think European countries have been shy or sneaky about their restrictions on online content.
I'm a lifelong US citizen and burst out laughing at this. What values? What coherence?
Do you mean the NSA man-in-the-middleing all that traffic and leaving a backdoor for Mossad? Imagine the most despicable possible invasion of privacy and the most reprehensible shadow oppression and manipulation of an uneducated populace you can conjure up.
Now imagine something way worse than that. This is America.
By law.
So, not so much free speech.
Where critical late night shows get cancelled because a small group of Trump-aligned people control most media?
Seriously, the world is looking in amazement how all the talk about free speech and democracy was purely performative.
The US becoming Hungary (or maybe Russia).