The pressure to leave US controlled cloud providers actually started way back with the US Cloud Act. I’ve been surprised that that process has been as slow as it has been, especially for the public sector and adjacent services.
Which begs the question, why should the EU see China as an adversary? That's mostly an American thing, the Pacific doesn't really concern us.
Maybe alliances will reshuffle in the future?
No rising Chinese middle class without the world's largest wealthy consumer market.
A match made in heaven ;)
Or the EU relying on the US army for defense ;)
We're not in the post ww2 world illusion or world peace through commerce, mutual dependencies clearly don't stop nationalist interests. Trump shattered the illusion with his illegal meme tier tariffs, now we're slowly going back to empires dealing with their friends while fucking over anyone else.
From the fall of the Berlin wall until the Ukraine invasion, the US saw Russia as more of an adversary than Europe saw Russia.
Yes, even after Russia annexed Crimea. In fact, it's only this year that Europe has started to significantly increase defense spending, three years after Russia invaded Ukraine. And, even then the most aggressive increase plans end up short of where spending was during the Cold War.
Every US president after Clinton (and maybe Clinton as well) urged European countries, especially NATO ones, to keep funding defense and they cut instead.
It turns out that the cowboys were right, that there was a bear in the woods, and that "soft power" wasn't power.
But I don't think that this makes EU policy necessarily incorrect: Would German military spending of 5% GDP have prevented the Crimea annexation?
We won't know, but I don't think so, and European militarism in the 2000s might have led to significantly worse outcomes than we actually got.
I also think that painting this as a clear "US stance proven right in hindsight" is an outsized claim; EU military spending only really came up under Trump, and was a very minor topic before. You could make a similar argument that "the cowboys" were all wrong with the whole middle-east interventionism thing (in Afghanistan and Iraq), but the military side of that was at least competently executed (unlike Russia in Ukraine), collateral damage lower and war crimes somewhat minimized/prosecuted.
I sadly agree that Costa-Rica-style pacifism appears a non-viable approach for the EU now despite looking somewhat workable 15 years ago.
From where I’m sitting in the EU, both seem successful in their quests.
(So I’m assuming they mean China.)
The US has nothing to offer Europe except LNG that Europe cannot produce itself, or obtain from China at better price or quality. Canada has ~200 years of LNG reserves and can ship to Europe from LNG Canada.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/imports/united-s...
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
The True Cost of China's Falling Prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876691 - November 2025
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-self-d...
> In 1995, China accounted for less than five percent of global manufacturing output. By 2010, that number had jumped to around a quarter, and today it stands at nearly a third.
Coincidentally it's also why the US and EU are growing further apart.
Authoritarian regimes will inevitably attempt to expand because authoritarian leaders view the existence of people they don't rule as a threat towards their rule and they inevitably desire to grow their control and power over more and more people.
Which is ironic that most of the annexation talk came from the US in the recent times, not from China. Canada, Greenland, Panama Canal, Mexico what else has he threatened to annex?
They’ve also engaged in widespread campaigns of asymmetric warfare against other countries. Lots of cyberattacks. Theft of intellectual property - corporate espionage but also copies of designs and hacks of government agencies. Unfair protectionism in their own markets. Lots more to list.
But mostly because the CCP just can’t be trusted with their power, because they’re neither democratic nor support liberal values like free speech. I think there’s a lot to admire about China and Chinese citizens. But their government is ultimately a threat to the world order and the progress of liberalism.
Is this implying that USA was paying for it previously? It sounds like they're blaming "noise polution", but also that they're not getting the planes for free anymore?
When you have the US Air Force in a program and they purchase a bazillion aircraft, things get relatively affordable.
Well, the US left and nobody want to spend billions of dollars into the development of this aircraft (most of the problems are the airframe not radar I heard, citation needed) and end up with just two aircraft and then deal with internal news about how they spend billions of dollars per aircraft when commercial airlines are so much cheaper.
Boing stock didn’t even fall down as much as the S&P500 so one can assume that this was already taken into account.
So... can't really blame Trump.
jacquesm•1h ago
I see the same happening with choices about other suppliers. The EU is a very large trading partner to the US and what is happening right now is unprecedented in the last 75 years or more. The damage to our future world order is incalculable and the fact that it all seems to be by design bothers me greatly.
The lyrics of Alan Parson's 'Children of the moon' have been spooking through my head lately.
macintux•56m ago
hshdhdhj4444•49m ago
saubeidl•48m ago
Now that no more protection is offered, there's no point in spending the money.
jacquesm•44m ago
lukan•20m ago
But I think it was a pretty bad appeasement deal.
barbazoo•26m ago
wbl•47m ago
jacquesm•46m ago
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/air-force-cancels-e-7-we...
usrnm•51m ago
I don't think "damage" is the right word, especially outside of the US. Changes aren't necessarily bad, and, as someone living in the EU, I actually like the current trend.
kogus•46m ago
If one takes a longer view of things, the period from WW2 to now is very much an anomaly reflecting relative European weakness in the aftermath of that war's physical and moral destruction. There is no intrinsic reason that the US should take the lead on, say, policy toward Russia. Quite the opposite.
jacquesm•44m ago
bix6•34m ago
Yoric•2m ago
The precedent being France and UK that were so disgusted by war after WWI (and recall that France was the historical biggest warmonger among Western nations at least since the second half of the Hundred Years War) that they didn't react to Nazi Germany annexing Austria, then invading Sudetenland, and in fact not even when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Had they reacted earlier, WWII might have been avoided.
jacquesm•46m ago
poszlem•17m ago
The popular narrative suggests a 'United States of Europe' is forming, but this seems like propaganda when you look at the reality, nations are already returning to the historical status quo, prioritizing their own agendas and pulling in separate directions, much as they always have.
A recent, clear example is the debate over using frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war effort. That single issue exposes the deeper divides. Belgium objects because it wants to shield its own financial sector. Germany backs the idea because it would spare it from taking on more of the financial burden. France, meanwhile, has long argued for a different approach, issuing joint EU debt, an option that many financially weaker member states would favor, but one Germany refuses to accept.
barbazoo•27m ago
Yokolos•8m ago
It's the same shit with the Baltic states and other former Soviet satellite states. They're terrified of Russia, but people in Germany or further West think it's all overblown propaganda and there's nothing to fear from Russia.
You being ignorant doesn't mean there aren't real issues and real, justified fears.
nxor•34m ago
CoastalCoder•21m ago
That might explain the current downvotes.
saghm•21m ago
petcat•16m ago
And it's not even clear if it's legal in the US. The Supreme Court is in the process of deciding that after a dozen US states sued about it.
saghm•15m ago
jshier•11m ago
saghm•6m ago
robtherobber•4m ago
> those who have never been here or taken the time to interact with an American
I think there's a misunderstanding at play here; in the vast majority of cases Europeans see Americans as reliable, cool-headed, friendly people. What they take issue with is the US' imperialist, heavy-handed, ombelico-del-mondo approach.
eduction•25m ago
An extreme and inaccurate statement. The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed.
What has changed is the US has become more realistic and up front about the limitations of its reduced military. It’s not healthy, for the US /or/ Europe, to indulge the imperial fantasy that US forces in Europe (token deployments in Germany and Poland) are sufficient to defend against Russian attack.
Trump is not the first US president to push Europe to do more of precisely what it is doing here (spend its own money on defense). Being clear about limits is what a reliable ally does.
Europe ordering an Airbus AWACS instead of Boeing now that the US stopped subsidizing them is not surprising nor does it mean the sky is falling.
lukan•17m ago
What changed is the US President saying things like, he will encourage Putin to invade countries not spending so much on military.
What also changed is the US President threatening members of the EU militarily over greenland for example.
Reliable allies don't really do that.
(you probably do not realize the shock Denmark felt over this, that went deep and the change will not happen over night, but it will happen)
poszlem•25m ago
A significant reduction in the quality of life for many in the 'so-called West' appears to be the unfortunate price of the world returning to a more 'normal' historical pattern of international relations.