Europe seeks 'digital sovereignty' as Trump hands power to 'ruling class of tech lords'

President Donald Trump’s imperialist gestures toward Greenland and quite-real conquest of Venezuela are alarming America’s European allies about the security of some of their most valuable assets — namely, their financial independence and national data.

European leaders are moving quickly to attain both “monetary sovereignty” and “digital sovereignty” from the United States, according to The New York Times. This plan includes reducing their reliance on American tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft for cloud computing. Additionally the European nations will start to wean themselves off financial services titans like Mastercard and Visa. French President Emmanuel Macron perhaps summed up the view most succinctly at a Belgium summit earlier this week.

European leaders must seize “the Greenland moment” to disentangle themselves from US tech and financial institutions, Macron told the assembled world leaders. He and other world leaders were also alarmed by Trump’s retaliation after the International Criminal Court (ICC) began investigating whether Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Trump imposed sanctions on the judges and prosecutors that cut off their access to financial and digital services, including credit cards, and led to the chief prosecutor’s Microsoft email being turned off.

Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, told The Financial Times that Trump’s actions with Israel demonstrate that Europe does not have control over their own financial and digital security as long as they rely on America.

“That gives you one very specific example of how we are not effectively sovereign in our own garden,” Lagarde said.

European nations are also worried about their finances because Trump has embraced stablecoins and cryptocurrencies they fear will destabilize the euro. In a similar vein, Trump has threatened European nations with tariffs if they try to regulate or tax American tech firms, even when their actions raise concerns about their competence and ability to keep sensitive data secure. On both occasions, the common thread is Trump handing so much power to the tech industry that Europeans feel unsafe both financially and in terms of their basic security.

Economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, recently explained to Amy Goodman from Democracy Now speculated that Trump’s ultimate agenda is to enrich himself and his allies while turning much of the control over the world’s financial and technology policies to Big Tech.

“We have the Steve Bannon strategy of making the rest of us, the rest of the world, you know, sink into a black hole of uncertainty, while he’s getting on with the business of enriching himself, a ruling class of tech lords around him, and solidifying his power and keeping his divided MAGA movement somehow pacified,” Varoufakis said.

Then again, as CNN’s Steve Cotorno reported earlier this month, even some of Trump’s own MAGA movement is bristling under the policies imposed by tech billionaires.

“It's reflective overall of what we are seeing from the populist right within Trump's movement,” Cotorno said. “People like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson have been very vocally against how much power Trump is giving to these tech companies, and it's reflective of changing views overall by the general population."

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