• U.S. tech companies risk losing access to the European market due to their alignment with the Trump administration, which is increasingly hostile toward the EU.
• Europe is reevaluating its reliance on U.S. tech platforms, seeing them as both a competitiveness issue and a strategic vulnerability.
• Legal challenges in Europe, particularly over data privacy, could sever transatlantic data flows, disrupting business models of companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft.
• European efforts to build alternative tech infrastructure could lead to a fragmented global internet, reducing U.S. influence and profits.
• Tech leaders' close ties to Trump have undermined trust in Europe, accelerating calls for regulatory and technological independence from U.S. firms.

Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality. By getting close to U.S. President Donald Trump, they risk losing access to one of their biggest markets: Europe.

Just a decade ago, these companies believed that information technology would limit the power of governments and liberalize the world. But then, as globalization withered and the U.S. confrontation with China took hold, they tried to take advantage of growing geopolitical divides, enlisting on Washington’s side in the new technological cold war. Now, the new Trump administration appears less enthusiastic about fighting China than it is about subjugating U.S. allies in the European Union and elsewhere. U.S. tech companies extract billions of dollars in profits from European markets. Although many of these tech companies would love to take the EU regulatory state down a peg, they don’t want to get caught in the crossfire of an all-out EU-U.S. tech war.

Unfortunately for Big Tech, such a war may be about to erupt. The Trump administration’s evident contempt for Europe may not only endanger the business interests of European companies. It could also spell the end of today’s open Internet, as Europeans look to build alternative platforms to those of the giant U.S. tech firms.

Silicon Valley’s efforts to cater to the Trump administration threaten to undermine Big Tech’s business model across much of the world. As tech executives have embraced the new U.S. government, they have increasingly embroiled themselves in the brewing conflict between European regulators in Brussels and an executive in Washington acting with striking unilateralism. As a result, Europeans are starting to take a second look at their reliance on U.S. cloud, platform, and satellite providers. They increasingly see such dependency not just as a competitiveness issue but also as a critical strategic vulnerability that could be exploited against them. Most worrying for U.S. tech companies is that even if European politicians are reluctant to act, European judges, regulators, and activists may act in their stead and push to sever data flows between the United States and Europe.

This is not the first time that a rift has opened between the United States and Europe on technology. A decade ago, the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the United States had been spying on European leaders, revelations that provoked EU threats to limit flows of personal data to the United States. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, explained in a 2019 book that the uproar around Snowden’s disclosures had created a lasting “chasm between governments and the tech sector.” When the European Court of Justice ruled in 2015 against an arrangement that allowed data on EU citizens to be sent to the United States, Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Alphabet, lamented that the EU might break the global Internet, “one of the greatest achievements of humanity.”

The global Internet will likely continue to exist in the form of shared technical infrastructure. But if U.S. companies persist in identifying with a U.S. administration that is hostile to Europe, it is likely that Europe will want its own companies and platforms to build technological fortifications against its former ally and protector. Chinese firms will try to expand in Europe, too, although they may also face greater public skepticism. Either way, the end result will be lower profits, weakened American innovation, and a more isolated and insecure United States.

JELLO ON THE WALL

Not too long ago, things weren’t so complicated. Silicon Valley’s business model seemed to go hand in hand with Washington’s geopolitical consensus. The U.S. government and U.S. tech companies agreed that the future lay in building a world that was safe for liberal politics and economics. The spread of the Internet and social media would inexorably undermine the power of autocratic governments. President Bill Clinton famously told China in 2000 that trying to control the Internet was like trying to nail Jello to the wall, and President George W. Bush funded the creation and spread of “liberation technology” that might nibble away at the foundations of dictatorship.

When social media seemed to amplify demonstrations in Iran in 2009, the Goldman Sachs executive Jared Cohen was working in President Barack Obama’s State Department. He asked Twitter to delay a technical downtime so that the platform would remain accessible to protesters. To be sure, the protests weren’t solely dependent on social media. Cohen would nevertheless go on to co-author a book with Schmidt, celebrating the power of technology to spread freedom and underpin shared prosperity.

U.S. tech firms could lose access to the European market.

Other technology companies supported this missionary zeal to remake the planet. In a notorious 2016 internal presentation, Andrew Bosworth, one of the “most trusted lieutenants” of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, told Facebook staff that someone might perhaps die because of bullying on Facebook’s services or in a terrorist attack coordinated with Facebook’s tools. Nonetheless, as the journalists Ryan Mac, Charlie Warzel, and Alex Kantrowitz reported in BuzzFeed in 2018, Bosworth argued that Facebook would go on. Its mission to connect the world, including, eventually, China, was “de facto good,” even if a few people had to suffer along the way.

Certainly, people suffered. In the early 2010s, as the autocratic regime in Myanmar seemed to start opening up, technology evangelists such as Schmidt argued that the country should embrace Internet freedom on the principle that “the answer to bad speech is more speech.” Government officials and religious extremists in Myanmar discovered other possibilities. They used Facebook to propagandize against the Rohingya minority, helping fuel a widespread program of genocide in 2016. Facebook lacked the technical and local language capacities to see what was happening, let alone to do anything about it.

Connecting the world did not, in fact, convert illiberal societies to liberalism. After Trump became president in 2016, many worried that the Internet instead made previously liberal societies more illiberal, drenching publics with disinformation. Some of Trump’s critics used sketchy arguments and weak empirical evidence to accuse Facebook and other social media services of having allowed Russian propagandists to manipulate Americans into voting for a leader with authoritarian predilections. Social media services responded by introducing new antidisinformation tools in the United States and other core markets, while often skimping on such safeguards in poorer countries.

LINES IN THE SAND

Another important transformation occurred around this time. During the first Trump administration, most U.S. politicians became China hawks. They began to think of technology not as a means of liberating China from autocracy but rather as a way to hobble Beijing’s ambitions. When Google’s “Project Dragonfly”—a planned censorship-friendly search engine for the Chinese market—was leaked in 2018, Democrats and Republicans both condemned it, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that it was “inexplicable” that Google was still investing in an autocratic country whose values were so at odds with those of the United States. Google abandoned its ambitions to return to China.

Big Tech tacked with the political winds, embracing the new technological confrontation. Business leaders also began to seriously rethink the role of technology in a world of geopolitical rivalry. Schmidt, who had stepped down from his role leading Google’s parent company, chaired a highly influential bipartisan commission whose final report in 2021 argued that the United States needed to beat China at artificial intelligence. It could do so by both building up its technological strengths at home and denying China access to the specialized semiconductors best suited to train the most advanced AI models.

Others combined grand geopolitical theory with narrowly self-interested pleading. Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, told Congress in 2020 that if U.S. authorities acted to regulate Meta too harshly or break it up, the United States would actually be helping Chinese competitors such as TikTok undermine American technological dominance. A plethora of Silicon Valley companies that had previously held the U.S. national security state at a distance began to realize that it offered an enormous new business market and joined the likes of the data analytics firm Palantir in trying to sell their services and platforms to the government.

U.S. tech seemed well positioned for Trump’s return to power this year, even before the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk became Trump’s universal plenipotentiary. Before last year’s election, influential figures such as Zuckerberg and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos began cozying up to the new regime; Zuckerberg courted Trump in private phone calls and, over the summer of 2024, removed restrictions that had been placed on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, while Bezos scrapped a planned endorsement by The Washington Post—the paper he owns—for Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris. After Trump won, both Zuckerberg and Bezos made pilgrimages to visit the president-elect at his residence, Mar-a-Lago. Trump clearly relished their obeisance, commenting in December that “everyone wanted to be my friend.” For their part, many tech leaders were hopeful that Trump’s victory would be a boon for them; Trump seemed hawkish on China and willing to deregulate tech. Companies such as Facebook and Google had given up on expanding into the China market anyway and hoped instead for a Trump administration that would gear up against their Chinese competitors and also push back against European regulations that Zuckerberg described in January as tantamount to a “censorship” regime.

TRANSATLANTIC DECOUPLING?

Big Tech’s leaders certainly didn’t want to make an enemy of Trump and had some reason to believe that he might help them. Tech CEOs and owners, including Bezos, Schmidt’s successor Sundar Pichai, and Zuckerberg were willing to be displayed at Trump’s second inauguration like so many hunting trophies mounted on the wall.

Unfortunately, none of them are really getting what they hoped for. To be sure, Trump’s second administration dislikes both domestic regulations and EU rules. However, at least for the moment, the government is continuing an antitrust case against Google that stemmed from investigations in Trump’s first term and is preparing actions against Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Trump seems happy to allow the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to keep operating in the United States, perhaps paving the way for a broader deal with China. And the Trump administration has evinced naked hostility to the EU, as evidenced by the private contempt for Europe expressed by Vice President JD Vance in leaked Signal messages. Rather than renegotiating the United States’ technology relationship with Europe on better terms, Trump’s demands that Europe back off from regulating U.S. tech companies (and that Denmark hand over Greenland) may lead Europeans to ask a question that U.S. tech firms don’t want them to ask: Is Europe’s reliance on American tech not just a competitiveness problem but a critical national security vulnerability?

Even during Trump’s first term, many Europeans found such questions unthinkable. The United States had supported Europe for decades. Although Europeans resented the dominance of American Big Tech, they had never seen an alternative or even necessarily wanted one. Casper Bowden, a British privacy advocate and former Microsoft employee, recounted how Europeans literally laughed at him when he warned about the surveillance risks of U.S. cloud computing in the years before the Snowden revelations.

Now, everyone in Europe can see the risks of relying on U.S. tech. The most obvious example is Starlink, the satellite communications firm owned by Musk. When the United States wanted to put pressure on Ukraine regarding possible negotiations to end the war with Russia, the White House suggested that it would deny access to Starlink, which provided the Ukrainian military with critical battlefield resources. Other European countries, now fearing that the United States might sell them out for temporary advantage, took note. They, too, depend on Starlink and other software, hardware, and technology for their daily operations. Europeans are moving away from Starlink as quickly as they can, with the European Commission investigating how it can support domestic alternatives. European car buyers, meanwhile, are turning away from Musk’s Tesla. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, in the eyes of many Europeans, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure business cloud services, and Facebook, too, all risk becoming damaged brands.

It’s not just that technology might be turned off but that it might be used against European interests. Musk’s intervention on the side of far-right groups in Germany and the United Kingdom, attacking mainstream parties, has many European capitals on edge. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has taken the argument a step further, warning that “tech billionaires want to overthrow democracy.”

BREAK THE INTERNET

There is an even greater threat to U.S. tech companies that has gotten far less attention. In sharp contrast to today’s United States, the European Union has a strong commitment to the rule of law, obliging politicians to comply with judge’s rulings. The Trump administration’s scofflaw tendencies and tech companies’ increasing hostility toward European values may lead to the collapse of the EU-U.S. arrangements on which tech companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft depend.

Schmidt worried a decade ago that an EU-U.S. data dispute might collapse the Internet. Snowden showed how U.S. intelligence agencies had illicitly accessed European social media and Internet search data, breaching European privacy rules. That dispute was patched over by an ungainly agreement, negotiated between the European Commission and the U.S. government. The EU agreed to allow data flows, as long as the United States committed to protecting the privacy rights of EU citizens and offered some means of redress if they were violated by U.S. surveillance agencies. The keystone of the arrangement was a 2016 U.S. commitment that Washington’s surveillance agencies would respect European privacy rights through a process overseen by an obscure U.S. body, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

This arrangement made nobody happy but provided legal and political cover for flows of data across the Atlantic. Meta continued to operate Facebook in Europe, and companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were able to host Europeans’ personal data on their cloud-computing platforms. For those companies, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Google alone makes over $100 billion in sales in Europe.

That arrangement is now on the verge of disintegrating, with the operations of U.S. tech companies in Europe in serious jeopardy. The Trump administration has not only fired most of the PCLOB’s members; it has also made clear in multiple ways that it will not comply with those legal rules that it finds inconvenient. The executive order that formed the PCLOB is under review—but even if it formally stays on the books, no one trusts the Trump administration to abide by it.

Everyone in Europe can see the risks of relying on U.S. tech.

This potentially opens up the arrangement to challenge by activists such as Max Schrems, a canny Austrian privacy advocate, whose legal complaints led to the collapse of two previous arrangements. As Schrems’s organization has already warned, it may soon be illegal for any European entity to use U.S. cloud services to store personal data or for companies such as Meta to move data on European citizens back and forth between Europe and the United States. That would likely destroy Meta’s business model while making it difficult for companies such as Google and Microsoft to offer safe cloud services in Europe. Even if they segregate European data from U.S. data, they will be vulnerable to U.S. demands to share information held on their European servers or to stop offering robust encryption to European customers.

This time, there will be no plausible agreement between the two regimes. European judges and national privacy regulators will be extremely skeptical of promises from the Trump administration, and rightly so. European judges are not subject to the same political pressures as European politicians or European Commission officials. They see themselves as the guardians of national laws and a European constitutional order, which Trump and his officials want to undermine. Nor will judges be sympathetic to U.S. tech companies. A decade ago, these companies were able to disassociate themselves from the excesses of the U.S. government, deploring the U.S. surveillance programs that they sometimes had been unaware of. Now, their owners and CEOs have quite literally lined up to display their support for Trump, undermining possible excuses and claims of independence.

Google and Microsoft currently control two-thirds of the European market for cloud computing. However, European politicians, academics, think tanks, and entrepreneurs are already converging on the notion that Europe needs to build its own cloud resources to gain the strategic autonomy that it needs to wean itself from U.S. technology. A European court ruling against EU-U.S. data flows would dramatically accelerate these plans. So, too, could sweeping U.S. trade tariffs, which Europe might respond to by restricting U.S. technology services.

If that happens, Big Tech will have no one to blame but itself. Its response to geopolitical changes has been to build a closer relationship with the U.S. government, anticipating that it could continue to thrive in a world of U.S.-Chinese rivalry. Tech leaders willingly embraced Trump after his reelection, when they could have kept their distance. Big Tech companies may be about to discover that not only are they never going to have access to the Chinese market but they are increasingly persona non grata in European markets, too.

These fraying ties may mark the end of the dream of a global Internet, in which everyone shares the same services. Just as in China, European platforms may continue to use the Internet as the technological foundation for their services. But they will begin to construct their own alternative platforms on top, walled away from U.S. interference through Europe-only business models and strong encryption. This will not just lower U.S. profits; it will further damage the transatlantic security relationship. Schmidt’s prophecy may come true a decade later than he expected, and U.S. tech companies will have been complicit in bringing it to fruition.

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• NPR CEO Katherine Maher faces congressional scrutiny as Republicans push to defund the network over alleged ideological bias.
• Maher’s background includes roles in U.S.-backed NGOs during Middle East regime-change efforts and Wikipedia’s censorship policies.
• Lawmakers will question her past statements on race, gender, capitalism, and collaboration with governments to suppress online content.
• Critical focus on NPR’s perceived left-wing slant, including lack of conservative representation and taxpayer funding concerns.
• Maher’s social media history shows support for deplatforming opponents and critiques of free speech as a "white Western construct."

• Andrew Cuomo's March 2020 directive forced nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, leading to thousands of deaths, including the author's parents.
• The author's father died in a nursing home on March 29, 2020, and his mother passed away on April 14, 2020, after contracting COVID-19 in her senior-care residence.
• Cuomo's administration undercounted nursing home deaths by excluding those who died in hospitals, dismissing concerns with the callous remark, "Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died."
• The author recounts the heartbreaking final moments with his parents, including limited visits, rushed funeral arrangements, and a graveside service under strict pandemic restrictions.
• Five years later, the author condemns Cuomo's political comeback attempt, arguing his policies recklessly endangered vulnerable seniors when isolation was their only defense.

On 25 March, 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, a single piece of paper, a directive signed by Andrew Cuomo, then the governor of New York, brought about thousands of deaths in nursing homes and similar care facilities. Among the victims were my parents, Michael J. Newman and Dolores D. Newman, but known as Mickey and Dee to anyone who knew them.

My father died at a nursing home in Long Beach, and my mother died at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset after contracting Covid-19 in her senior-care residence in Far Rockaway. Her passing was recorded as a hospital fatality. We would later find out that my mom’s death along with thousands of others would be undercounted by the former governor as he infamously said, “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”

Now, as Cuomo tries to revive his political career as the next mayor of New York City, I feel duty-bound to recall his lapse in judgment, and what it did to my family.

I first began tracking Covid in December 2019 as part of my job as a battalion chief with the Fire Department of New York City. My family was visiting my mother-in-law in Canada over the Christmas holiday, and even though I was on vacation, I couldn’t help looking at the news feeds. I read that another “flu-like” virus was causing illnesses in China, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary.

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By late January 2020, it was obvious that Covid wasn’t your ordinary “flu-like” virus from the People’s Republic like SARS, say. Covid-19 was a disease that no one could hide from. It was a pandemic that would turn all our lives upside down and, in my case, result in an unbearable tragedy.

By early March, Covid was no longer an abstraction. Universities were closing. My oldest son’s concert for the Long Island String Festival Association was cancelled two days before the performance. Masks became commonplace in grocery stores and other public settings. Rumours swirled of sweeping lockdowns to come, including at nursing homes like the ones my parents lived in.

The last time I had a conversation with my father was probably 7 March, based on a photo I took from the window of the care centre, which shows massive waves crashing along the Long Beach coastline. We talked about the waves, the winter storm that sent the swell, the weather in general.

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Dad had competed in road races since the 1970s as a way to stay and fit and socialise, and he was always aware of what was going on outside. I don’t recall what else we discussed, but I had no way of knowing this was to be our last chat. I visited him one more time, before the lockdowns kicked in, but he was napping, so I decided not the wake him.

I sat at his side for about 15 to 20 minutes, then tidied up his area the best I could, got a quick update from the desk nurse and left. Looking back, I was relieved that he was sleeping, because one-on-one conversations had become more taxing as his dementia progressed. I thought I was getting a one-time reprieve, and the next time I would bring Mom, who lived at a different facility nearby. The poor state of my father’s health precluded him from leaving nursing home-rehab for my mother’s senior care living centre, but the plan was to get my dad well enough to join his wife in the double room that we had secured for both of them in the assisted living residence.

I had no idea that I missed my last opportunity to talk to the man who raised me and instilled in me a love of history, athletics for sake of wellness, and personal accountability. I carry that guilt to this day.

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Before the lockdown, it was hard to get my father to eat. But we had no way of knowing how much his health deteriorated behind the closed doors of the lockdown and away from the watchful eyes of visiting family members.

Daily phone calls from staff were cold and inadequate (Dad was incapable of using the phone on his own). I do remember a call I received near the end of March letting me know they were moving my father to a different floor. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. But looking back on it now, I believe it was to make room for the Covid-positive patients, as mandated by Cuomo’s orders. As for Mom, it was much easier to say in touch; she still had her cellphone and we remained in constant contact.

The living centre that we chose for Mom was close by, and they agreed to accept Dad when he was released from rehab (Dad’s health was not good enough to be accepted at most other centres). Tragically, they were never reunited, since my father suffered a urinary-tract infection in the summer of 2019, which was the same illness that brought my mother to the hospital a month after Dad.

On 29 March, at around 11 a.m., I received a call from a doctor at Dad’s nursing home explaining that he was running a low-grade fever and that he was lethargic. Three hours later, the same doctor called to tell me that my father had died. The call was professional and brief. To be clear, we don’t blame these facilities. They were following the governor’s health orders.

One of the hardest things I ever had to do was to call my mother and tell her that her husband of 60 years had passed. Another pressing issue was that my father’s body had to be removed within a certain number of hours, or they would be forced to send his remains the county morgue; the clock was ticking.

Our deus ex machina came in the form of a friend from the old neighbourhood in Flatbush, Brooklyn: Frankie. He was a funeral director on Staten Island and was closer in age to my older sister, Donna, who put in the call. Frankie promised to get Dad out of there before he was sent to morgue, which was significant, because these facilities were already overwhelmed with Covid patients who succumbed to the illness, and there was no way of knowing how quickly we could have gotten him out of there for a proper service.

By the early evening, Frankie let us know his nephew was going to pick up Dad and take him back to Staten Island. My sister Donna and I decided to meet him there. I called my good friend Mark, a fellow fireman, who lived nearby, and asked him to come by with whatever uniform he could muster on short notice.

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I found an official FDNY sweatshirt in my house and headed over myself. We weren’t pretty, but this meant my father had an honour guard. We waited in front of the nursing home for Dad to come. We gave my father a proper salute and made sure to put his body bag in the van ourselves — a final show of respect for a man who was a military veteran and a retired member of the Fire Department, having served during one of the busiest eras of fire duty in urban history.

My dad told my mom a while back that he wished to be cremated, so Frankie handled it, and even took my dad home with him, saving me a trip to Staten Island until we figured out what to do with his ashes. An appropriate resting place for my father became available within two weeks.

I got some flowers and headed over to Mom’s care centre a couple of days after Dad passed. When I arrived, they were kind enough to let me into the lobby, as there were still no visitors allowed. I handed Mom the flowers, but didn’t hug or kiss her, as I didn’t want to infect her nor anyone else there.

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We spoke through masks from 10 feet away for a few minutes, and I left. As I drove home, the song “Mickey” by Dick Robertson played on SiriusXM’s 40’s Junction station. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard that song. I would not expect Dad to be dramatic, but you never know.

As with the nursing-home rehab facility my father had been living in, Andrew Cuomo would also direct Covid-positive patients into assisted-living facilities like the one my mom was at.

About week after I saw Mom, she said that she wasn’t feeling well. Her symptoms worsened, and she was admitted to the hospital. The day she arrived, we talked several times from her cellphone as she waited in the emergency room or transfer area for a room to open up. On the evening of her second day there, we had our final conversation. The last thing she said to me was to make sure my two boys were given Easter presents on her behalf. The next day, the hospital called to say that my mother had passed away. It was 14 April.

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Frankie continued his work as our angel of mercy. He organised everything he could for us. A church funeral service was out of the question with all the restrictions in place, but he was able to arrange for a burial service at Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where my family has had plots for many generations. What I didn’t anticipate was that my mother needed a dress for the burial.

Returning to the apartment where I grew up, on the top floor of the four-story walk-up, felt like strolling through a mausoleum. It was quiet and stuffy. I had been there many times since my parents entered care homes, but this visit felt suffocating. I picked out a dress and some jewellery and made my way to Frankie at his Staten Island funeral home. We hadn’t seen each other in many years, but that neighbourhood bond remained strong.

The graveside burial service was held on 18 April. The sky was grey and undecided. Flashes of light briefly broke through the clouds but never held, bathin everything around us in a sepia tone. Donna, my sister, was able to secure a priest from nearby Good Shepherd Parish to perform the service (within days, it would be it close to impossible to get a priest, what with so many people dying).

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Frankie also arranged for two US Air Force airmen to attend the service and present an American flag to my family. Donna, my brother, Michael, and I decided that our niece Danielle (Donna’s daughter) should accept the flag. Danielle spent a great deal of time with my parents growing up, and it just made sense. After the service, there was no collation. We couldn’t have a lunch where we could unwind and console each other. We retreated to our respective cars, still wearing our masks, and returned to our homes. It was the best goodbye we could have hoped for, given the circumstance.

Dad and Mom were always “MickeyandDee”, as if they were one entity. The last six months of their lives in care facilities was the only time they were ever separated. Fittingly, Frankie got approval from the director of the cemetery to place Dad’s ashes in Mom’s casket. In the end, they were reunited, and they would spend eternity together, the same way they lived their lives.

Five years later, it’s important to remember that then-Gov. Cuomo’s 25 March nursing-home directive wilfully brought disease to the group least prepared to defend themselves against the novel coronavirus. Their only chance was isolation. Nursing homes and similar care centres were the keep in the castle for these seniors. They had nowhere else to run. Instead of putting up barricades and putting up a final defence, Covid was helped through the front by a decree from the man who now wants to lead Gotham.

• The EU's "Preparedness Union Strategy" urges citizens to prepare for disasters, including floods, fires, pandemics, and potential Russian invasion, recommending stockpiling supplies like food, water, and power banks.
• Countries like Poland and Germany are reviving Cold War-era civil defense measures, such as bomb shelters and bunker geolocation apps, while Norway advises iodine tablets for nuclear threats.
• The strategy is criticized as fear-driven, mirroring past propaganda like "Duck and Cover," and seen as an attempt to consolidate EU power in security and crisis response, traditionally managed by national governments.
• The narrative of an imminent Russian attack on Europe is dismissed as exaggerated, with concerns that fear tactics are being used to justify militarization and emergency rule, similar to COVID-era policies.
• Public skepticism is growing, but EU elites may resort to more authoritarian measures, like banning political rivals, as fear-based governance loses effectiveness.

Mild feelings of panic were induced across the European Union last week, as citizens were urged to prepare for impending disaster. Stock your cupboards! Draft emergency plans! No, it’s not the opening of a mediocre dystopian novel — it’s the EU’s newly minted “Preparedness Union Strategy”. This grand initiative is designed, allegedly, to protect Europeans from floods, fires, pandemics and, of course, a full-scale Russian invasion.

The strategy draws inspiration from Poland, where housebuilders are now legally obliged to include bomb shelters in new builds, and Germany, which is reviving Cold War-era civil defence schemes with a bunker geolocation app. Meanwhile, Norway is advising people to stock up on iodine tablets in the case of a nuclear attack. 

The EU wants its citizens to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours, recommending households stockpile food, water, medicine and — why not? — playing cards and power banks. Because, of course, should nuclear war break out, a good round of poker and a fully charged phone will see us through. 

Yet, as ludicrous as these preparations might seem, they should worry us all. The Preparedness Union Strategy is only the latest layer in an architecture of control that has been building for decades. It rests squarely on the shoulders of the EU’s recent defence policy reboot, ReArm Europe, now renamed less ominously, “Readiness 2030”. 

The core narrative behind this push is simple and endlessly repeated: the idea that Russia is likely to launch a full-scale attack on Europe in the coming years, especially if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine. The European Parliament resolution in favour of the ReArm Europe programme warned that “if the EU were to fail in its support and Ukraine were forced to surrender, Russia would then turn against other countries, including possibly the EU member states”. As Macron recently put it, Russia is an “imperialist” country that “knows no borders… it is an existential threat to us, not just to Ukraine, not just to its neighbours, but to all of Europe”. 

But the notion that Russians are massing at the borders, with designs on Paris or Berlin, is a fantasy. Indeed, when we’re told to prepare for war by packing a power bank and a waterproof pouch for our ID, it’s hard not to be reminded of Cold War absurdities like “Duck and Cover”, the “preparedness strategy” of the time designed to protect individuals from the effects of a nuclear explosion by instructing people to crouch to the ground and cover their heads. That campaign, too, sold the illusion of safety in the face of annihilation. And beneath the clownish veneer of the push lies a calculated aim: the EU’s attempt to further consolidate power at the supranational level, elevating the Commission’s role in security and crisis response — domains traditionally under national control. 

The EU’s preparedness plan is based on the recommendations of a report from the former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö, which calls for the establishment of a central operational crisis “hub” within the European Commission; greater civilian-military cooperation, including by conducting regular EU-wide exercises uniting armed forces, civil protection, police, security, healthcare workers and firefighters; and developing joint EU-Nato emergency protocols. 

When considered alongside the EU’s rearmament plans, it suggests a comprehensive, society-wide militarisation, something which in the years ahead, will become the dominant paradigm in Europe: all spheres of life — political, economic, social, cultural and scientific — will be subordinated to the alleged goal of national, or rather supranational, security.

Western governments have been resorting to fear as a means of control for a very long time. Indeed, it’s a telling coincidence that the EU’s announcement coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Covid lockdowns, which ushered in the most radical experiment ever attempted in fear-driven politics. 

The pandemic response used a totalising narrative that wildly inflated the threat of the virus to justify historically unprecedented policies. As the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, put it, it was everyone’s moral duty to “come together against a common enemy” and “wage war on the virus”. In this struggle for the greater good — public health — virtually any action was justified. 

From the perspective of “crisis politics”, the widespread use of the war metaphor to frame the Covid pandemic was no coincidence: war is, after all, the emergency par excellence. Across the globe, we saw an authoritarian turn as governments used the “public health emergency” to sweep aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarise societies, crack down on civil liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control. 

Throughout the pandemic, we witnessed — and populations largely accepted — the imposition of measures that would have been unthinkable until that moment: the shutdown of entire economies, the mass quarantining (and enforced vaccination) of millions of healthy individuals and the normalisation of digital Covid passports as a regulated requirement for participating in social life. 

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All this prepared the ground for the collective reaction of Western societies to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a real war at last, after years of rehearsing metaphorical ones. In terms of communication, we immediately saw the emergence of a similarly totalising narrative: it was Western societies’ moral duty to support the Ukrainians’ fight for freedom and democracy against Russia and its evil president. 

However, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Ukraine is losing the war, and as the world is faced with Trump’s attempt to negotiate peace, European elites are recalibrating their narrative: it’s not just Ukraine’s survival at stake — but that of Europe as a whole. The threat is no longer over there but right here at home: not only is Russia preparing to attack Europe, but, we are told, it is already waging a wide array of hybrid attacks against Europe, ranging from cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to election interference. 

All this suggests that Western elites learned an important lesson during the pandemic: fear works. If a population is made anxious enough — whether about disease, war, natural disasters or some polycrisis cocktail comprising all of the above — they can be made to accept almost anything.

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The EU’s Preparedness Union Strategy could, therefore, be read within this broader context. It is not really about water bottles and power banks. It is a continuation of the Covid-era paradigm: a method of governance that fuses psychological manipulation, militarisation of civilian life and the normalisation of emergency rule. Indeed, the EU explicitly talks of the need to adopt, in case of future crises, the same “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” approach first spearheaded during the pandemic.

This time, though, the attempt to engineer yet another mass psychosis seems to be failing. Judging from the social media reaction to a cringeworthy video by Hadja Lahbib, EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management, there appears to be widespread scepticism about the bloc’s fearmongering. But while this is good news, the worry is that as propaganda falters, those in power are increasingly turning to repressive tactics to muzzle political rivals — evident in moves like the electoral ban on Le Pen. This strategy of mounting authoritarianism, though, is untenable in the long run: fear and repression are no substitute for actual consensus, and in the latter’s void, new forms of resistance are bound to emerge.