Europe and the U.S. “face the same sort of threat and the same threat actors,” said Cairncross, who advises Trump on cybersecurity policy. Rather than weaning off America, wean off China, he said: “There is a clean tech stack. It is primarily American. And then there is a Chinese tech stack.”
Claiming that U.S. tech is as risky as Chinese tech is “a giant false equivalency,” according to Cairncross. “Personal data doesn’t get piped to the state in the United States,” he said, referencing concerns that the Beijing government has laws requiring firms to hand over data for Chinese surveillance and espionage purposes.
The attempt to quell concerns is notable even if it may not change the direction of travel in Europe. The European Commission wants to boost homegrown technology with a “tech sovereignty” package this spring. It presented a cybersecurity proposal in January that, if approved, could be used to root out suppliers that pose security risks — including from America.
“We want to ensure that we don’t have risky dependencies when it comes to critical sectors,” the Commission’s Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen told POLITICO in an interview in Munich on Friday. “We see this in AI, quantum technologies and semiconductors — we must have a certain level of capacity ourselves.”
Europe’s attempt to pivot away from U.S. dependencies, while not new, has gained support in past months as the transatlantic alliance creaked. The POLITICO Poll conducted in February showed far more people described the U.S. as an unreliable ally than a reliable one across four countries, including half the adults polled in Germany and 57 percent in Canada.
“The leadership claim of the U.S. is being challenged, perhaps already lost,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the conference Friday.