It is November 2026. President Donald Trump announces a new executive order on “Regulating Access to American Technology”. This decision grants the president powers to declare a digital security emergency and limit or shut down US digital services—like cloud services, AI applications and military software—to foreign users. The purported goal is to safeguard national security and technological supremacy. The executive order cites European digital policies and taxes as threats to American technology security. Asked how his move could affect US allies, Trump remarks that “some countries may not be our allies in the future”.
The reactions of US big tech companies are mixed. Some praise the president for his “courageous leadership”, while others vow to challenge the executive order through all legal avenues. The absence of clarity in the law regarding executive powers over digital services creates a fog of uncertainty.
In early 2027, the State Department announces sanctions against “the suppression of free speech abroad”. Romanian prosecutors who charged former presidential candidate Calin Georgescu with plotting a coup are placed on US sanctions lists. American digital companies suspend services to these individuals, denying them access to emails, social media accounts and cloud data.
Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce announces another reform to its export control regime. The export of advanced AI chips for data centres now requires an individual licensing agreement—from which other parties can only gain an exemption if they enter into a technology security agreement with the US. Trump officials signal they are keen to work out a such an agreement with the EU, but only if the bloc drops its “unfair” regulatory barriers against US digital trade. Semiconductor orders from EU gigafactories are put on hold.
After a tech dinner at Mar-a-Lago, the Trump administration declares that Meta and Apple will not be paying the fines totalling €700m recently levied on them by the European Commission. The White House announces a law similar to the European blocking statute that prohibits digital and tech companies from complying with the EU’s digital regulations and allows those companies to recover damages.
Europe’s technological dependencies
Can we trust foreign technology companies to form the backbone of Europe’s digital transition? The digital realm’s spread into virtually all aspects of modern economies and societies means policymakers across the EU ought to be providing an answer. Worries about numerous European dependencies on China are now well aired in the public debate. Yet, so far, European decision-makers have only just started to grapple with what it means to be so deeply dependent on American digital technologies.
Three US giants provide 70% of Europe’s cloud computing infrastructure. American companies dominate Europe’s phone operating systems, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become synonymous with the concept of AI. Starlink represents a near-monopoly on Europe’s satellite internet services, as does Nvidia in AI chips. The market for social media—the digital squares of the European demos—are also dominated by US companies Meta and X.
Until recently, Europe’s technological dependencies were a problem confined to the world of antitrust and innovation policy. But Trump’s second stint in the White House has already transformed Europe’s digital overreliance into a geopolitical test. He has not hesitated to weaponise the economic and technological dependencies of others in pursuit of his own objectives.
In Ukraine, American officials threatened to shut off Starlink satellite services unless Kyiv agreed a minerals deal with Washington. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court lost access to US digital services after being targeted by American sanctions. Against Europe, Trump has weaponised both the threat of tariffs and the promise of tariff relief in an attempt to force the EU to water down its digital regulations, which seek to protect European citizens from the unfair practices of technology companies.
This issue is also not limited to Trump’s whims; a potential change in US leadership in 2028 will not necessarily provide relief for Europe. In his last weeks in power, President Joe Biden adopted the AI diffusion rule, which curtailed the number of American AI chips that a number of countries, including EU member states, could import. There was no way out of this for the 18 states affected: the administration was uninterested in striking a deal with them nor did it wish to punish them. Its goal was to limit leakage of chips to China, America’s primary strategic competitor.
The US could also coerce Europe by imposing qualitative restrictions on exports to Europe. In the realm of defence, for example, Trump has announced that any F-47 fighter jets sold to allied nations will be downgraded, citing potential future shifts in alliances. Trump has also mused that Nvidia Blackwell chips sold to China could be “enhanced in a negative way”. A similar “qualitative restriction” approach could include selling inferior technology in satellite networks, chips, digital services or AI models.
The experience under Biden should have been a sharp reminder that it is not just Trump-style direct coercion that Europeans have to worry about. For any number of reasons, Europe might find itself confronted with service shutdowns, facing restrictions on the absolute amounts of US digital technologies it can import, or denied components essential to developing digital technologies.
About the Author:
Giorgos Verdi is a policy fellow with the European Power programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations.