> I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.

Even more mundane reason would be the USA threatening war.

Before you come and say something like Trump threatening to invade Greenland and annex Canada is just bluster/ these are democracies that answer to their people, and their people are mad about that, which is going to direct policy. The sentiment in those countries about the US is on par with those on Russia and China, if you think that is not to the US detriment I’m not sure what to say.

> Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.

If the US decided to sanction Airbus, decent odds that the EU would make it illegal for EU businesses to comply with those US sanctions.

Similar to how the US has made it illegal for US firms to comply with Arab League sanctions against Israel

If we continue using US hyperscalers then we deserve to have our industries turned off when Trump decides to grab Greenland. Being stupid should get punished.

Recently the US gov't had Microsoft shut down an ICC judge's work email account. The threat is very real of more serious shenanigans (though I personally think the risk of backdoors introduced to any other software they use is just as real - Europe is just too much of a patchwork of jurisdictions to get this right).