US can probably use their soft power to influence them not to do that. Also would imagine the US gov could also set up some more censorship resistant access methods.
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.