Early this year I was thinking "will I still have access to this service if they invade Greenland?"

Never had to do it before. That's how much it has changed.

The answer is yes.

You don't think Ukrainians can't buy stuff from Russia (and vice-versa)?

Can I still get Google Adsense payments when Google has my European bank account and address if there are sanctions or something like that? Can I still login to my Cloudflare account and manage a domain registered with them? Will I lose access to Outlook or Gmail? Should I rely on Claude at all?

But the problem isn't if I can bypass sanctions, use VPNs, etc, or even if a company wants or can legally do that... it's the fact I'm asking these questions at all. It's not something I'd ask 15 years ago about US companies.

That's your fantasy. Reality is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49607443

It doesn't happen overnight, but the adversarial behaviour of the current administration and the tariffs really changed the perspective about America on many Europeans.

The discussion about building European alternatives had never been so mainstream. If and once they emerge, I think the shift will happen. But let's see

2 years is not a long time. What I’m telling you is that sentiments have changed dramatically, and every government and company board across the continent is taking actions to position itself according to those sentiments.

You won’t see the full effect of that for at least a decade, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Weaponizing the dollar against Rusia first, and Iran now is damaging the world's confidence in the dollar-based monetary system beyond repair

It's a slow shift, but it's coming. For instance, Airbus already picked a French AWS replacement (Scaleway). It won't be all, it won't be tomorrow, but "what happens if we get tariffed / they invade Greenland" is already part of everyone's disaster planning.

The reality seems to be that for decades Europe gave only lip service to decoupling from American tech infrastructure, but in the last couple of years America has gone from being seen as a strong ally to being a major risk.

It will take time to move. Frankly as an American I hope it takes a long time and we get our shit together and rebuild our alliance with Europe. But it’s possible that the damage is not reversible in the next couple of decades and Europe will accelerate their decoupling. It’s also possible we continue to slide into imperialist authoritarianism (and Europe definitely accelerates their decoupling).

Also, what lip service, exactly?

This is what I mean: Americans don’t understand the immense dividends they have enjoyed from being the defacto symbol of “progress” in the 20th and 21st centuries so far. American solutions were chosen by European customers because they were reliable trading partners with an air of modernity. Homegrown was seen as the antithesis to leapfrogging into the future.

People celebrated when McDonald’s came to their country or town. Not anymore.

Aren't the supply chains hopelessly intercoupled in a million tiny ways? E.g. turbine blades being done by this single German company, x1000

They absolutely are. But this doesn’t mean that they won’t unwind those couplings. It just means it will be hard and take time.

I think it is perfectly understood. But we don't feel we are the ones that deteriorated the relationship, we are just reacting to it

> I don’t think Americans are realizing yet how much has changed for us the past two years.

In two more, possibly less, the current administration will be gone. The Trump agenda will be dead in the water by the end of this year.

While I basically agree with you, I wonder how quickly people will forget.

I'm not sure if it's really a "trump agenda". The ideas didn't start with him, the people who voted for said ideas aren't going to suddenly disappear, and this is his second term.

It looks more like part of the new normal from the outside, and that's why things are changing. A country can't go from reliable to unreliable partner every 4 years without any consequences.

Even the people that voted for Trump didn't sign up for this, which is why his approval ratings are terrible even by historic standards. He didn't run on a platform of "attack Canada and suck up to Putin". Most Americans are very pro-European. Most of the voting population has living memory of the cold war.

As to what happens post-Trump, it's anyone's guess. I expect a hard reset. Markets have short memories, as they say.

Not to the same extent, but during his first term, his administration had issues with Canada, Mexico, Europe/UK, NATO, China, etc. Tariffs were a thing back then already. And he was elected again. Clearly it wasn't a huge issue for those who are bothered to go out and vote.

In any case, for everyone else, it's the second time in 10 years that they have to play the waiting game until it's over. It's good to be optimistic, but when you're in charge of a country, you can't just plan for the best and rely on hope alone. Same if you run a company or and even with services you as individual use.

Regarding memories, I don't know about the markets, but in Europe I think it will take a few years for everyone to forget that in 2026 Denmark had to transfer blood reserves to Greenland and that different European countries deployed tripwire forces because of... the US of A. Do you know who triggers similar responses? Russia, when they start saying that their borders are fluid.

Hedging your country’s future on American presidential approval numbers is political suicide in Europe, as it rightly should be.

Yea I don’t think this will blow over just because trump (might be?) is gone.

Frankly this already started under GW Bush from my perspective and just has gradually gotten worse.

I don’t think you can unboil a frog that quickly. This will take many years to resolve / build up trust again.