Europe Warns US and China Could Use Technology as Political Leverage
Europe is sounding the alarm. As the rivalry between the United States and China intensifies across the global technology landscape, European leaders are increasingly worried that both superpowers could — and already do — use technology as a tool of political coercion. From semiconductors and cloud computing to artificial intelligence and critical minerals, the digital dependencies Europe has built over decades are now being reframed not as conveniences, but as vulnerabilities. The question is no longer whether technology can be weaponized as political leverage. For Europe, the question is: what happens when it already has been?
The New Battlefield: Technology as Geopolitical Power
The 21st century’s great power competition has moved well beyond military alliances and trade tariffs. Technology — who controls it, who supplies it, and who can cut off access to it — has become the defining currency of geopolitical influence. Europe finds itself caught in the crossfire between two technological superpowers: the United States, which dominates cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and advanced chip design, and China, which has aggressively cornered critical minerals, legacy semiconductors, and an expanding portfolio of telecom infrastructure.
Both Washington and Beijing have already demonstrated a willingness to use these technological dependencies as leverage. China’s sharp reduction of critical mineral exports throughout 2025 sent a clear message: it could disrupt European industries at relatively little cost to itself. The US, meanwhile, has imposed asymmetrical export restrictions that affect European firms seeking access to China’s vast consumer and manufacturing market. Europe is now squeezed from both sides — and its leaders know it.
As one leading analysis from the European Union Institute for Security Studies concluded, Europe now faces “the dual risk of asymmetrical US restrictions on European tech exports to China’s ‘must-have’ market, and — more dangerously — an emboldened China that knows it can disrupt Europe’s industries at little cost.
The “Kill Switch” Fear: Europe’s Dependence on US Technology
The phrase that has rattled corridors in Brussels is stark: “kill switch.” European Commissioner for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen warned that Europe must ensure “nobody has a kill switch” over its critical digital systems. It is not a hypothetical concern. A striking 80% of Europe’s technology currently originates from outside the bloc, with American hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — dominating cloud computing across the continent.
The European Parliament adopted a resolution in January 2026 by 471 votes to 68, warning that “power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of non-European companies, limiting Europe’s ability to innovate, compete, and maintain control over its digital economy, society, and democracy.” Members expressed particular alarm over excessive reliance on foreign actors in cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, AI, and cybersecurity.
Estonia’s Digital Minister Luukas Pakosta put it bluntly: “This has made digital sovereignty a matter of national survival, not just IT policy.” She added that relying on “closed, proprietary ‘black box’ solutions creates a strategic vulnerability” — a concern that extends to American platforms just as much as Chinese ones.
China’s Strategic Squeeze on European Industry
While US tech dominance raises concerns about long-term dependency, China has been more immediately coercive. Beijing has weaponized critical minerals — materials essential for electric vehicles, defense technologies, semiconductors, and clean energy infrastructure — as a tool of geopolitical pressure. By restricting exports of rare earth elements and other critical inputs, China forced significant policy retreats from Washington and sent ripple effects through European supply chains.
In 2025, the European Union recorded a goods trade deficit with China of approximately 360 billion euros — roughly $420 billion — a figure that has intensified anxieties in Brussels and major European capitals. European policymakers increasingly fear that unchecked Chinese industrial overcapacity could hollow out domestic manufacturing across strategic sectors.
The situation is further complicated by the US-China trade truce, which, rather than relieving pressure on Europe, may have redirected it. As one German Marshall Fund analysis noted, “a US-China trade truce frees China to concentrate its pressure on the largest remaining open market: Europe.” With no quick diplomatic fix available, Brussels is scrambling to respond.
On the telecommunications front, the vulnerability is physical and structural. Germany only ordered the removal of Huawei and ZTE components from its 5G networks in July 2024 — yet Huawei is still expected to account for 59% of the German 5G network by 2028. Even after the ban, the timeline for full removal has been pushed back to the end of 2029. This delay illustrates the difficulty Europe faces in disentangling itself from Chinese technological infrastructure once embedded.
Europe’s Response: The Tech Sovereignty Package
On June 3, 2026, the European Commission unveiled a sweeping tech sovereignty package designed to address these vulnerabilities head-on. The proposals, which require approval from all 27 member states, include new actions to bolster advanced semiconductor manufacturing within the EU, promote homegrown cloud computing alternatives, and reduce dependency on non-European AI services.
The package also includes a strategy to leverage open-source technologies — an approach intended to reduce reliance on proprietary American platforms. Additionally, the EU’s new Cybersecurity Act proposal from January 2026 could give Brussels powerful tools to limit or exclude Chinese vendors from connected sectors based on cybersecurity standards. The EU’s improved foreign direct investment (FDI) screening framework is expected to enter into force in the summer of 2026, closing loopholes that previously allowed Chinese investment to flow through EU-based subsidiary entities.
The target, according to Commissioner Virkkunen, is to “achieve something visible by 2030” — an acknowledgment that meaningful change will not happen overnight but that the trajectory must shift now.
The ASML Card: Europe’s Hidden Leverage
Despite its precarious position, Europe is not without cards to play. The continent controls critical chokepoints in the global technology supply chain, most notably through Dutch company ASML, which holds a near-monopoly on the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines essential for producing advanced semiconductors. Without ASML’s machines, neither China nor even the US can manufacture cutting-edge chips at scale. This gives Europe significant — if underutilized — leverage in technology negotiations.
The EU also boasts world-class telecommunications hardware companies in the form of Nokia and Ericsson, meaningful capabilities in quantum computing research, and the technical infrastructure for undersea cables and satellite systems. The challenge is not a lack of assets but a lack of strategy for deploying them.
As the European Council on Foreign Relations observed, “Europe holds significant leverage across trade, technology and infrastructure. But it lacks a strategy for how and when to use them.” That strategic gap is precisely what Brussels is now racing to close.
Internal Divisions Threaten Europe’s Unified Response
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to Europe’s technological independence is not external pressure but internal fragmentation. The EU’s 27 member states do not speak with one voice on technology policy, and that disunity is being exploited by both Washington and Beijing.
France and Germany have voiced concern that recent US-EU trade arrangements may favor American producers at Europe’s expense. Spain has wavered on joint policy positions regarding Chinese imports. The European Commission reversed sanctions on a Chinese chip supplier after carmakers warned they would run out of components — illustrating how supply chain dependencies can override political resolve in real time.
This internal fragmentation risks weakening the EU’s collective leverage, allowing both Beijing and Washington to question Europe’s autonomy to design its own industrial strategy. As long as member states pursue bilateral arrangements with the superpowers, the bloc’s unified front remains more aspiration than reality.
The Path Forward: Strategic Autonomy or Strategic Dependence?
Analysts, policymakers, and industry leaders are increasingly converging on a difficult truth: complete technological independence for Europe is unrealistic in the short to medium term. No European enterprise will abandon US hyperscalers entirely. Huawei components will remain in European networks for years. Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, and industrial components will continue to flow into European markets.
But “strategic autonomy” does not require complete independence. It requires strategic indispensability — a concept borrowed from Japan — which emphasizes controlling critical leverage points rather than duplicating entire supply chains. Europe’s strength lies in its market size, its regulatory influence, and its control of specific technological chokepoints. Spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure in Europe is projected to more than triple to $23 billion by 2027, reflecting a genuine shift in investment priorities.
The European Commission’s tech sovereignty package, the new FDI screening rules, the Cybersecurity Act, and the Industrial Accelerator Act collectively represent the most ambitious push toward technological self-determination the EU has mounted. But ambition must be matched by execution — and that has historically been Europe’s Achilles heel.
Conclusion
Europe’s warning about the weaponization of technology by the US and China is not alarmist — it is a recognition of how power already operates in the modern world. Both superpowers have demonstrated, through export controls, mineral restrictions, platform dominance, and supply chain manipulation, that technology is not merely an economic asset but a political instrument.
The stakes could not be higher. Europe’s democratic institutions, industrial competitiveness, and geopolitical autonomy are all, to varying degrees, contingent on who controls the infrastructure that underpins them. The tech sovereignty movement is Europe’s belated but essential effort to ensure that neither Washington nor Beijing holds a kill switch over the continent’s digital future.
Whether Europe can move from warning to action — from dependency to resilience — will define its role in the world for decades to come.
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