Trump’s trade wars signal the alarm
This ‘instrument’ is apparently a ‘trade bazooka’, rather than a bassoon. Whatever it is, though, the clear objective is to defend the EU economy from US attacks, as would be the inevitable new EU tariffs we would see in a full-blown trade war.
Reciprocal tariffs are all very well, and, despite some of the more breathless reporting, in fact tariffs aren’t actually bad per se. Trump’s blunderbuss use of them, though, demonstrates that the days of the weightless and infinitely-interconnected global economy are gone (as if such things were not already evident from the past decade of European politics).
Ostensibly intended to bring manufacturing back to the US but more obviously being used to beat other nations into submission (I am ignoring the mooting of a quixotic scheme to abolish income tax and replace it with tariffs), Trump’s tariffs are particularly bad news for Ireland: a record Ireland-US goods trade surplus was recorded in 2025, totalling €50 billion. As a recent article in The Currency pointed out, this amounts “to a quarter of the EU’s entire trade surplus with America”.
However Europe chooses to respond, one thing we can be sure of is that it will not be by ditching US technology for home-grown alternatives. Doing so would be impossible.
Since the 1980s, and certainly the 1990s, Europe has let its tech industry wither on the vine. This is true from top to bottom, with neither enterprise nor consumer computing spared. National mainframe outfits like ICL and Siemens big iron arm were flogged off to Fujitsu, while microcomputer pioneers all gave up the ghost in the face of the US onslaught. Finland’s rubber boot, television and mobile phone conglomerate Nokia did well until 2013, when Microsoft bought it’s devices and services business for €5 billion. Microsoft wrote off the cost of the acquisition in 2015 as Apple and Google swallowed up the smartphone market.
Homegrown talent
On the upside, Netherlands-based ASML, a spin-out from Philips, has become a crucial player in the global semiconductor industry, particularly known for its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, and Britain’s Arm Holdings is a major designer of CPU cores.
Likewise, there are some major software companies based in Europe, of course, such as SAP in Germany and the UK’s Sage, as well as important players in niche verticals – think Nemetschek in architecture and construction – and even some genuinely interesting challengers (who among us wouldn’t like to see Adobe get slapped by Affinity?)
Overall, though, Europe has apparently been happy to cede development of the technologies that run our lives to a small group of companies in the US and, increasingly, China.
So, while Europe instead concentrated on technology consulting and managed services, the US had led the way on designing and developing the technology that runs our world.
One bright, if flickering, light is Le Chat, a widely-hailed artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that is giving OpenAI, Google and Anthropic a run for their money. Whether or not this app, or indeed large language model (LLM) AIs in general, are the future remains to be seen, but what is hard to ignore is that it occurred in the context of a concerted AI policy on the part of France. Indeed, president Emmanuel Macron recently announced plans to dump another €100 billion into the sector.
However, if, on the whole, Europe doesn’t really do computing or information technology (the two are not the same), what, then does it do?
Lots of things. Germany’s current suffering due to energy costs aside, the country remains a major exporter (though decades of wage suppression play a role in this) of manufactured goods: cars, of course, but also chemicals, pharmaceuticals and precision instruments, among others.
The aerospace and defence sectors are strong, primarily as they are considered strategically important (something that seems a fair assessment given the world we live in), and while the service sector is the largest contributor to Europe’s economy, accounting for some 75% of GDP and employment, the fact remains that we can make stuff if we feel like it.
Regular readers of this column will be familiar with the argument that letting ourselves be led around by the nose by US multinationals is a mistake. Clearly, the ship sailed long ago on ‘client computing’ (AKA desktops, laptops and their operating systems), but it is worth considering if the total domination of this space by a handful of US-based companies really was inevitable.
If nothing else, it may help us to avoid making the same mistake again – and, in any case, the Internet is slowly eroding much of the value in desktop-land anyway. While the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft certainly have a grip on the online world, there may be more room for manoeuvre than is commonly thought. For instance, plans to counter the dominance of Google in search have not impressed, whether they come from EU-based competitors or the likes of Microsoft, but the arrival of LLMs suggest that search may not be the battlefield of the future.
Likewise, objections to Europe’s regulatory regime coming both from the tech giants and the new US administration are, ultimately, an admission of weakness as they indicate a desire to slant the playing field in favour of the incumbent player.
With a US administration that could, at best, be described as self-interested and mercantile and, at worst, increasingly hostile to other countries, who in Europe could object if we started to take seriously the task of building up our technological capacity?
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers