Trump's tech threat: How strongmen could reshape EU digital policy

Hans Kribbe argues argues that achieving greater industrial autonomy in the EU will only be possible after Europe improved its basic economic fundamentals.

Elon Musk featured prominently in the parliamentary hearing with Henna Virkkunen, the designated Commissioner for Tech Sovereignty. The EU and the controversial tech billionaire have a long history of conflict: Former Commissioner for Digital Thierry Breton clashed repeatedly with Elon Musk over the lack of content moderation on X, for example.

On several occasions, Members of the European Parliament indicated that the incoming Trump II administration required the EU to develop a European tech stack and decrease dependency on the US.

To really understand how the political dynamics related to the EU’s tech policy may play out in the new Trump administration and in particular with Elon Musk having a set at the President’s table, I spoke to someone who wrote a whole book about how “strongmen” like Donald Trump and Elon Musk think: Hans Kribbe, the founder and director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics and co-founder of Shearwater Global.¹

Hans spoke eloquently about how security policy and economic policy become ever more intertwined in a “strongmen world” and that in order to compete, Europe needs to ensure that it creates the economic incentives for companies to thrive and survive. Without these basics in place, he says, Europe is unlikely to achieve technological sovereignty any time soon.

Read the full interview with Hans below; the interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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In your book, you describe how the EU increasingly has to deal with leaders that you call “strongmen” such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Can you briefly explain what you mean by “strongmen”? How does the worldview of a strongman differs from the worldview of a typical Eurocrat?

In modern states, government is highly institutionalised and also bureaucratised: We have government agencies which are put in charge of specific tasks, we have our legal system, we have presidents and prime ministers and parliaments. And they’re all connected to rules and laws that delimit and codify these powers.  

The strongmen essentially do not wish to govern through this institutional framework, preferring to act through informal, parallel systems or a “shadow state” based on personal loyalties of friends, oligarchs and family. And this network is of course invisible and outside the purview of public scrutiny. 

Strongmen wish to govern not through institutions, but through an informal “shadow state”

How do strongmen conduct foreign policy? While the European Union is built on the idea of multilateralism, it seems that strongmen are realists when it comes to foreign affairs, is that correct?

Yes, I do think they are realists. We in Europe love multilateralism, international organisations and international law because in this way our interests are protected on the global stage. The strongmen’s approach to diplomacy is very different. They reject international bureaucracy and wish to conduct diplomacy at a much more personal level – leader-to-leader, man-to-man, as Trump put it once. 

You’ve written your book during the first Trump presidency. What have we learned about how he governs?

We know that Trump is deeply transactional. This will not change. He goes into high-level international meetings to make deals that benefit the United States. America first, that is his only principle. Transatlantic ties and so-called “special relationships” have no intrinsic value to him. 

He generally feels that the United States has been getting a very bad deal with NATO – “the steal of the century”, he calls it. But also in all kinds of other international fora. The WTO for example. This is why he wishes to renegotiate America’s relationships with the main players in the world, such as China and Europe, for example on trade.

The European attitude of looking down on Trump has not paid dividends.

In addition to the deal, Trump also craves respect. He needs to be told how great and smart he is. Europeans looked down on Trump as somebody who was not sophisticated or literate enough to understand how trade really works. They felt they needed to educate and enlighten him. But we learned that this petulant approach is not going to pay dividends.

What does work is giving him lots of respect, rolling out red carpets, slapping him on the back in front of the cameras. In his first term, the Queen invited Trump for a state visit to Buckingham Palace. He loved it.  

If Trump believes that America got a bad deal and he wants to change this deal, this analogy works well for international trade agreements. But during the European Parliament’s hearing with designated Commissioner Henna Virkkunen, a lot of questions evolved around the newly acquired power of Elon Musk and whether he may use it to dodge some of the EU rules such as the Digital Services Act (DSA). Would you share this fear?

Yes, this is a serious danger. When Trump talks about redefining trade relationships he is not just talking about tariffs, but also about how we regulate US players, including Musk’s X.

It is unlikely that Trump himself has clear ideas about the DSA and how we regulate tech in Europe. But we do know that Elon Musk has Trump’s ear. We also have the comments of J. D. Vance, the vice president-elect, who explicitly said that if Europeans want to “censor” and fine X under the DSA, it stops making sense for the US to continue to guarantee Europe's security in NATO.  

I am not sure this possibility has fully sunk in in Brussels and other European capitals. But if this is the position the Trump administration takes, little remains of our freedom to set our own regulatory policies. With the war going on, European leaders would be tempted to let X off the hook, water down the Digital Services Act or find creative solutions for a negotiated settlement that Musk can live with it. He now holds the upper hand, not the European Commission. 

Trump now holds the upper hand, not the European Commission

So you would expect that the incoming US government will be much more proactive than the Biden administration in protecting the interests of American companies abroad and that this engagement will be tied to completely unrelated policy areas such as defense?

I think we will have to wait and see. I don’t think tech regulation in Europe is very high on Trump’s agenda. He seems to care more about other sectors such as cars, energy and steel. And I also think that some tech companies would be hesitant to lobby the White House to play the security card in this way, which on the long term could clearly also backfire. But we obviously need to be aware this risk exists.

On the second point, economic and security policy are of course already linked. Just look at China and European supply chain dependencies in areas such as the green economy. Or look at Russian gas and oil. Why should Trump not use the security leverage he has over Europe, including by threatening to abandon Article 5 of NATO? 

Clearly, the fear of dependence on the US is top of mind for EU policy makers at the moment. This is also reflected in Henna Virkkunen’s mission letter. When it comes to tech, she has two big tasks ahead of her: One is to accelerate the adoption of new technologies so that we can close the productivity gap between the US and the EU. And the other is to build a European tech stack. The question for me is what is the right order here? Building a European tech stack takes a lot of time and money. And in the end, the result is not necessarily better than what is already on the market. Do you think that increasing Europe’s tech sovereignty is really the only option that we have? Or is there common ground that we can find with the Trump administration? 

We will continue to rely on US technology in the foreseeable future because we have no European alternatives. And I don’t see the biggest threat to European sovereignty arising from the US threatening to withhold certain digital technologies and services from the European market. For companies such as Google, Apple or Microsoft, Europe remains a big market, so such a move would come at a significant cost to the US.

I think the bigger risk lies in the United States using our security dependency to influence and shape digital and other economic policies in Europe, for example in how we trade with China.

I do agree Europe needs to invest in its technological sovereignty. But we have to be realistic here. There is a huge technology gap between the EU and the United States and also China. It takes massive investment to close this gap and the economic conditions for attracting such investment just don’t exist at the moment.  

Without a sound economic basis, achieving greater industrial autonomy or resilience is going to be hard in any sector. Take the Swedish battery factory Northvolt, meant to offer a European homegrown alternative to Chinese-made batteries. Geopolitically, it was the right move. But today the company faces bankruptcy. Calling for greater tech sovereignty and European champions makes sense politically. But you also need to be able to make the business case, and for now that is not always easy.

For the time being I believe Europe has little choice but to rely on the US tech industry. Yes, we do need things such as Europe-based data centres and cloud infrastructure, but we’re not going to build them without collaboration and joint ventures with US tech companies.

📚 Read on

In this article (in German), Ansgar Baums and Nicholas Butts argue that export controls for technology are often more expensive than assumed and may even strengthen your enemies.

In this essay, Sujit Raman seeks to find common ground in approaches to digital sovereignty, privacy and cybersecurity between the EU and the US.

EU regulations make it harder for firms to do “radically new things”, Pieter Garicano writes and this makes is extremely difficult to build “superfirms” in Europe.

1. Hans Kribbe (2020): The Strongmen. European Encounters with Sovereign Powers (Agenda Publishing).