Despite its talent, Europe struggles to scale domestic tech companies, leaving it strategically vulnerable. It's forced to depend on US cloud providers it views with suspicion or Chinese alternatives it also distrusts, with no viable third option.
A key to China's industrial rise is its systematic willingness to reverse engineer best-in-class global products. The West's potential cultural aversion to this practice, especially with Chinese goods, is a significant hurdle to rebuilding its own advanced manufacturing capabilities.
The original Monroe Doctrine was a defensive policy born from a position of weakness relative to European powers. Reframing it today as a core U.S. foreign policy pillar represents a significant scaling down of American global ambition, not a return to greatness.
Historically, the FCC regulated media ownership and radio waves with national security in mind. This function was shelved in the 1990s with the rise of the WTO. Recent actions signal a deliberate effort to revive this legacy and reposition the FCC as a key player in U.S. national security policy.
The administration's aggressive, unilateral actions are pushing European nations toward strategic autonomy rather than cooperation. This alienates key partners and fundamentally undermines the 'Allied Scale' strategy of building a collective economic bloc to counter adversaries like China.
By banning only *new models* of foreign drones, the FCC is signaling a long-term protected market for U.S. manufacturers. This gradual approach acknowledges that the current domestic industry is uncompetitive and needs time and incentive to scale up to compete with firms like DJI.
While data residency is a concern, political resistance and energy shortages may slow data center construction in the US and Europe. This could force Western AI companies to utilize the massive, rapidly-built capacity in places like the UAE, making the region a critical AI infrastructure hub.
Framing the US-China AI dynamic as a zero-sum race is inaccurate. The reality is a complex 'coopetition' where both sides compete, cooperate on research, and actively co-opt each other's open-weight models to accelerate their own development, creating deep interdependencies.
The U.S. reactively chases news headlines (like rare earths) without a rigorous framework to identify its most critical dependencies. Policymakers have not prioritized whether to secure wartime supply chains or mitigate China's leverage over consumer goods that could spark domestic political crises.
While China's control over rare earths is a known risk, the U.S. is equally dependent on China for common but critical goods like car seats and children's books. An export ban on these seemingly non-strategic items could create immediate and widespread political pressure.