alt Hacker NewsThe concern over "digital sovereignty" is motivated by the US wielding sanctions as a political tool against Europe.
It's impossible to fully eliminate any exposure to US sanctions. If the EU wants to fully shield itself, it should aggressively counter-sanction American entities. If the US government knows that every time it sanctions some EU entity, an American entity will get sanctioned just as hard, it will think twice.
For some reason, the EU has been unwilling to go down this obvious path.
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> the EU has been unwilling to go down this obvious path
Well, the EU in general tends to favour the "lets sit down in a room and talk like grown-ups" approach to finding solutions to problems.
Wielding sanctions as a first/second choice option is a very US thing, even more so with the present administration.
In theory the EU does have a lot of options available to it beyond sanctions, such as making life difficult getting Schengen visas for all those US citizens you constantly read about on the CNN website who are flocking to Europe .... but that sort of action would be very un-European[1][2]
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/us-family-relocated-miami-ita... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/central-eastern-europe-americ...
> If the EU wants to fully shield itself, it should aggressively counter-sanction American entities
This isn’t a realistic option without an independent security posture. Washington could bankrupt Europe overnight right now with targeted tourism, technical and financial sanctions. (And increasingly, energy.) All of that before considering kneecapping Europe’s NATO-integrated kit.
The problem is that European (in the EU and outside) countries do not have the same ability to sanction the US as the US has to sanction them.
If the US imposed sanctions that blocked access to cloud services a lot of the government and the private sector would just shut down.
Take what happened to the French ICC judge and imagine that happening across a whole country and far more pervasively (because a lot of people he deals with will not follow US sanctions, but would have their own services cut off if his country was sanctioned): https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-t...