alt Hacker NewsThe 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...
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The EU could absolutely find ways to hurt the US economy just as much as vice versa. It doesn't have to use the same tools as the US. Just ban major US companies from doing business in the EU. Impose massive fines. Get creative.
The EU economy is on par with the US economy. The EU has plenty of ability to hurt the US economy.
The reason this doesn't happen is because the EU isn't a country. It doesn't have a unified central government. It's 27 different sovereign states, each with their own completely different foreign policy. The type of policy I'm describing requires a unified political leadership willing to play for high stakes.
This is why China has been so much more effective than the EU in the trade war with the US. It's not that China theoretically has better cards to play. It just has a central government.
> If the US imposed sanctions that blocked access to cloud services a lot of the government and the private sector would just shut down.
You don't think they'd rather maybe find alternatives rather than shutting down? Sure, it'd be sucky probably for a long-time, but it's not like we don't have IT professionals who can stand up physical servers, email servers and what not, plenty of local municipalities do so already, so somewhere there is expertise already.
People generally don't just give up and throw their hands in the air in the face of difficulties, even less so when the governance of their country depends on it.