While I agree with you, I think the problem goes beyond military equipment. There’s a lot of risk now in doing business with America in every field, because it’s so unpredictable. Why get cloud or SaaS from the US if they’re one executive order away from being forced to break the GDPR — or shut off service completely, like Maxar in Ukraine. Why build supply chains through America if the price of raw materials can arbitrarily change with tariffs? Sure, it’s a huge market to sell to, but all of those risks have real costs.
I work in IT. We already have several customers projects (various profiles) that paused all their ongoing projects to _start_ migrating their servers and hosted services away from US-based/owned ones towards EU-based ones.
I was thinking the same thing. Europe should build its own cloud. All purchased US goods and services are now a potential target for a match of arm wrestling.
Yes, I agree. There was a view that Trump is at least transactional - that so long as you pay (NATO defense spending target, US weapons etc) he'll have your back,.in a subscription basis. Likewise outside defense I guess.
I'm beginning to think that being somewhat reined in by the Republican establishment in his first term, a weakness that the MAGA-crowd sought to correct, ultimately worked in his favor in protecting him from his poor instincts.
It's like he doesn't understand that trust and reliability have a real, tangible value. That's simply a misjudgment. Maybe he actually believes that America is so exceptionally strong that any sort of cooperation ultimately works against it?
It's terribly sad and depressing frankly. A small part of me still has hope that this is going to end badly, in that it turns into a useful lesson, but not badly enough to cause lasting damage. I might be naive.
We’re only seven weeks in, and the damage so far will probably take a decade to fix. I’m not as optimistic as you about the remaining 201 weeks — if that in fact is the number.
