Take a look around. Imagine the US moves on from Iran and focuses again on Greenland. They are no in discussions to open more bases. And during the middle of those discussions, as the US has done multiple times now, the US attacks. And let’s say the Danes blow the runways and are able to stymie the initial attack. How does the US respond? It could be to lean on Google and Microsoft and shut down Azure and AWS in Denmark, or for any Danish company. It would certainly deny (in any way it could) access to US weapons, such as software for mission planning. Spare parts would stop, as well. F-35s would be useless. American anti-air systems would be useless. American made missiles would be useless.

What if Germany and the UK and France help. They might see their payment systems shut down, along with those electronic services. Imagine not being able to use a credit card in most places in Europe, because American companies block transactions. Imagine not being able to fuel a commercial airliner. American troops would not have to leave their bases to create massive chaos across Europe, just by shutting off a few services.

All of it has to be dual-stacked. No EU government and no NATO government should rely on services from US companies, and they might need to do that a lot sooner than expected. There won’t be time for a five year plan to introduce the legislation necessary to facilitate the adoption of …. It will happen in short order. Not all EU cloud providers are safe. As they depend heavily on software and components from the US. But they need to have versions of their stack, or alternates, that could operate if they were sanctioned by the US government.

It’s a big job. It’s expensive. And it involves a lot of low-level, technical toil. But I don’t see, at this point, how Europe has a shot at avoiding catastrophe, given the current administration. But it all ends in January 2029, right? Will it? Trump’s supporters aren’t going away. The anti-immigrant xenophobia isn’t going away. The beer-hall patriotism that wants to solve everything by dropping iron bombs isn’t going away. 79 million Americans won’t just go back to “normal” after years of being unhinged.