By Aaron Brantly
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in the United States and the subsequent policy positions espoused by his administration should constitute a wake-up call to the entirety of Europe on the importance of quickly and effectively establishing digital sovereignty. Where once the United States sought to work within an established rules-based international order, the Trump administration seeks to leverage power politics for national and personal gain in a manner that is unprecedented in the post-war world. This new age of power politics for personal gain will expand the limits of Washington’s conceptualization of commercial internet activities and will push what Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall once termed the DC Commercial Internet and the Silicon Valley Open Internet models[1] into an alignment that is likely to seek substantial leverage over the technical and policy levers of the global Internet. These measures are likely to manifest through technical, infrastructural, and capital changes that will erode and undermine the European Union’s (EU) efforts to establish a rules-based internet that protects the rights and security of European citizens. European digital sovereignty establishes the primacy of authority over European cybersecurity and digital rights within Europe and is vested in its people rather than with third parties.
The substantial body of law created by the General Data Protection Regulation and the Digital Services Act, and legislative and policy actions culminating in the Gigabit Internet Act of 2024, have emphasized the fundamental rights of EU citizens in a digitizing world. These laws, policies, and regulations will be increasingly threatened in the coming months and years as the Silicon Valley–quasi libertarian model of the Internet and the DC commercial model of the Internet[2] are reshaped and paired together. Where once there was a tension between Washington and Silicon Valley, the Trump administration has leveraged the power of the federal government to force firm compliance and undermine state laws and regulations. The result is a centralization of power over the Internet and digital technologies more broadly into the direct purview of the federal government in a manner likely to undermine the power of the states and concentrate power into an unpredictable executive branch. Moreover, this centralization is increasingly paired with a muscular foreign policy, inclusive of militarism and economic warfare.
How will US militarism and economic warfare play out in the digital domain? First, the Trump administration will likely challenge what has commonly become regarded as the Brussels effect,[3] seeing it as an impingement on US economic and sovereign interests. The Brussels effect highlights the spillover consequences of EU regulatory standards on global markets. Bradford finds this effect to be pronounced within digital spaces.[4] The spillover arising from rules and regulations within the GDPR and DSA elevates the sovereign concerns that the EU has for its citizens within digital spaces and extends these rules, in part, to the citizens of other countries because of markets. The most visible example of the Brussels effect is the proliferation of requests for the acceptance of cookies in web browsers outside of the EU. US technology firms and the US government have historically been vocal opponents of EU regulations and laws, and claimed they were “Unfair and Disproportionate.” More recently, the Trump administration has directed US firms to ignore the Digital Services Act, and in December 2025, the US sanctioned 5 EU figures involved in regulating tech companies, saying their work amounted to a form of censorship in response to what it perceives as regulatory hostility. The shift in position extends to more conventional forms of cybersecurity that are of strategic importance to Europe. For instance, the current administration has paused or rolled back cyber operations against Russia, reduced funding for the Cyber Infrastructure and Security Agency, revoked AI safety policies, and disbanded the Cyber Safety Review Board, among multiple other changes
Recent efforts by the Trump administration diverge from the tailored strategic approach to fostering national security of both the EU and the United States undertaken when the Biden administration sought to shift European firms away from strategic adversaries such as China and Russia through stringent export bans on semiconductor fabrication manufacturing firms like ASML. Examples of a shift in US policy are prevalent and occurring in the case of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital services regulations. US efforts to constrain the sovereignty of the EU in digital spaces are likely to be increasingly aggressive and parallel the weaponization of language from Vice President Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2025. Concurrently, the US is deregulating its own markets in ways that potentially make security breaches and violations of rights more likely rather than less.
Pairing efforts that undermine the citizen rights and commercial interests of the EU with prior national strategies that establish the ability of US Cyber actors to operate in and through the sovereign cyberspace of other states to defend forward and conduct persistent engagement,[5] the result is a multifaceted approach that undermines the social, political, economic, and sovereign territorial interests of Europe in digital spaces. The positioning of the US as the global hegemon in digital spaces predominantly serves its own economic and national security interests. Where EU and US interests align, cooperation is possible, yet at present, it appears that the US is poised to push to exert pressure to ensure its interests take precedence over those of Europe and result in a disconnect that undermines EU strategic autonomy.
Further complicating debates on US power politics in digital spaces and EU efforts to establish digital sovereignty are long-simmering disagreements over basic internet governance functions. While a candidate in 2016, Trump was strongly critical of Obama-era decisions to cede control of the ICANN and IANA away from the US Department of Commerce. Moreover, the current US Secretary of State also strongly opposed the transition of internet governance functions to an independent ICANN. Should the President and his Secretary of State seek to exert substantial control over the Internet, they might even attempt to regain control over the root functions of the Internet’s naming and addressing systems.
The weaponization of the Internet across multiple dimensions by the current administration in the US parallels activities undertaken by both Russia and China. In the latter case, China has sought to manipulate information in and transiting the global Internet to retain domestic control and shift global public opinion. The EU stands out as the last rules-based major power exerting influence over the Internet for the protection of the rights and security of its citizens, rather than solely the political, economic, or security interests of the state.
The world has changed over the last year. The imperfect systemic resilience diligently built over the previous two decades across multiple US administrations with European counterparts is under increasing strain. The voracious appetite of the US to not cooperate in but rather dominate global markets, ranging from AI to semiconductors to everything in between, is inevitably going to run headlong into the security and sovereignty interests of Europe. Where once the US sought to achieve absolute gains in security, it is increasingly focused on relative gains.
The EU is at an inflection point. If it continues along its current path and fails to adequately establish its sovereign rights in cyberspace and to take increasing ownership over continental cybersecurity concerns arising not only from Russia and China but from the United States as well, it will find itself with declining relative cybersecurity and digital sovereignty. The Council of the EU recognized many of the challenges arising in cyberspace prior to the actions of the new US administration, when it concluded that the EU Agency for Cybersecurity needed to be strengthened. Yet there is still a significant underestimation of the threats facing Europe’s cybersecurity and digital sovereignty. ENISA estimated that in 2024 there were “more than 11,000 serious cyber incidents” across the EU. Europe may not be in a kinetic war with Russia, China, or other global powers, but it is clearly being impacted in cyberspace. In December 2025, the Council of the EU decided to adopt restrictive measures against individuals and entities operating on Russia’s behalf against European interests.
Europe faces a world in which the US is both increasingly isolationist in its diplomatic and alliance efforts and assertive in its projection of self-interested power. This creates an oscillation between power politics and an unwillingness to assist or engage on core security or rights-based issues. It is a world in which Russia, China, and others feel increasingly emboldened to fill the vacuum left by the US to undermine European interests for strategic or financial gain, knowing that the EU is increasingly going it alone, or worse, is concurrently facing a hostile former ally.
European digital sovereignty is critical for safeguarding European interests in a rapidly shifting digital landscape, flush with advances in AI, surveillance technologies, robotics, cloud computing, social networking, terrestrial and orbital internet infrastructures, and many more continue to evolve and place pressures on state security, economics, politics, and human rights. The digital future of Europe hangs in the balance. Digital sovereignty for Europe should be the lodestone for a concerted effort that fosters both security and rights.
Europe is strongest when it fosters robust and resilient sovereign rights for its citizens, when it builds organizations that bring together a plurality of perspectives, and when it funds those organizations in a manner that empowers them to provide effective solutions. Lionel Jospin, in his May 28, 2001, speech in Paris, declared, “let us remember that Europe is a civilization, that is at one and the same time a territory, a shared history, a unified economy, a human society and a variety of cultures which together form one culture.”[6] Europe faces a practical imperative. It must continue to safeguard its digital sovereignty against all states that would seek to vassalize the continent in the service of spheres of influence or power politics. To do this, it must foster stronger collective security organizations such as ENISA. It must also foster dynamic international and supranational relationships on the continent, including training, information sharing, and coordination to rally around common European security and rights concerns. A fragmented nationalized approach to common cybersecurity and digital sovereignty issues in the face of great power politics is likely to fracture and undermine European independence, security, and resilience. Establishing digital sovereignty creates a bulwark against external intrusions into the unique cybersecurity needs and rights concerns of Europe.
Bradford, Anu. Digital Empires : The Global Battle to Regulate Technology . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197649268.001.0001.
Jospin, Lionel. “Address by Mr. Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of Republic of France on the Future of an Enlarged Europe May 28, 2001.” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 5, no. 2 (2001): 149–61.
O’Hara, Kieron, and Wendy Hall. Four Internets : Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Smeets, Max. “U.S. Cyber Strategy of Persistent Engagement & Defend Forward: Implications for the Alliance and Intelligence Collection.” Intelligence and National Security 35, no. 3 (April 15, 2020): 444–53. doi:10.1080/02684527.2020.1729316.
[1] Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall, Four Internets : Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Anu Bradford, Digital Empires : The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023), doi:10.1093/oso/9780197649268.001.0001.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Max Smeets, “U.S. Cyber Strategy of Persistent Engagement & Defend Forward: Implications for the Alliance and Intelligence Collection,” Intelligence and National Security 35, no. 3 (April 15, 2020): 444–53, doi:10.1080/02684527.2020.1729316.
[6] Lionel Jospin, “Address by Mr. Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of Republic of France on the Future of an Enlarged Europe May 28, 2001.,” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 5, no. 2 (2001): 149–61.