All governments should be divesting from the US.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Put the Untied States on economic time out until it behaves
Glad to see the EU taking a stand.
Here in the US our government has turned on us, so any iota of resistance we can get from the international community is a welcome sight.
"A deal is a deal"
The fuck it is. There are no deals possible with the US. Bad faith actirs with no court, congress or rule of law.
A deal is a piece of paper trump wipes his orange ass with.
Indeed, I'm all 🍿
Unfortunately the EU has no say in the tariffs that the US charges its own citizens. US customs can just ignore the Supreme Court ruling and keep charging people to get their stuff out of lockdown and there's not a whole lot anyone can do. In theory the Supreme Court could maybe charge Trump with contempt of court but that's about as likely as Trump suddenly becoming a decent human being instead of an ambulatory bag of excrement.
Unfortunately the EU has no say
Actually we do, when Trump last time threatened EU, EU suspended the ratification process of the trade deal, and Trump IMMEDIATELY pulled back.
EU has lots of options to retaliate against USA, for instance tax on American IT services is a very high ranking one.
Just Denmark alone supply 70% of insulin to USA. And handles 30% of container cargo to USA. This was revealed recently because of Trump threats against Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
USA is far from as independent as they like to pretend, they have dependencies even on a tiny country like Denmark of only 6 million citizens.
EU has given many admissions to USA under Trump, but patience is running out.
I like the option of not acknowledging US copyrights, patents, or trademarks for a minimum of one year
Let's see how quickly the oligarchs attack Trump
They could just start with not enforcing the anti-circumvention clause of the us dmca.
Let there be jail-broken iPhones with European owned app stores.
All existing U.S. patents, trademarks, and copyrights are are permanently invalid. Gotta put some teeth into it.
They put in new clauses in the 750 billion trade deal between EU and US, if Trump threatens to take Greenland one more time the deal is off the table: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-parliament-us-trade-deal-approval-us-donald-trump-proof-safeguards/
patience is running out.
run out faster
America breaks its own economy, EU crashes with them, mass unemployment and depression follows, right wing extremists swoop in and seize power blaming immigrants, and swear fealty to the MAGA empire. Complete conjecture of course but just something to consider.
if patience runs out eu acts before that tho, or am i misunderstanding?
I think patience has already run out. It is rather a calculated approach of identifying what does and what doesn't depend on the USA, and setting up alternatives for those things that do depend on the USA for example through trade deals (Mercosur, India) and investing in independent tech (funding open source projects, governments moving to native tech alternatives).
In the past year the EU has found out that it depends scarily much on the USA, but also that it can be more independent than expected while also having serious economic leverage.
I agree, it's a game of minimizing the damage. But at some point, there may be a desire to teach Trump a lesson.
According to game theory, you definitely need to shut the bully down thoroughly at some point. We have not done that yet. Even if we are the weaker party, we need to do this:
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-game-theory-bullies.html
Losing patience IMO is the point where we take the lesson from game theory, and do something to retaliate that harm USA and Trump.
The problem with applying that part of game theory here is it makes several assumptions.
The biggest is that the bigger party are playing for maximisation, rather than just to "win". That is very much not the game with trump.
The second is the assumption that there is only 1 game in play at a time. America could cause devastating economic damage, if it went full tantrum. Europe has noticed how vulnerable they are to that sort of action. They need to patch the holes before playing hardball.
Under these assumptions, taking fairly meaningless hits to buy time makes sense. Pull the wolf's teeth, before challenging it to bite you.
No game theory account for such scenarios too. The ones not playing by the rules are normally psychopaths and the like, so game theory is about handling that type of scenario when the normal rules no longer apply. It's not just about simple greed, people brake the rules for various reasons. Psychopaths like Trump and the White House, simply feel more entitled, and they need to be shown very clearly that it will not be accepted.
We absolutely need to respond to Trump according to game theory, because you can't control him by throwing him a cookie from time to time, he will always come back for more until he is stopped. The exact same as with Putin, despite they are different psychologies.
Trump is a bully because he thinks he can get away with it. When he is shown he can't, he is most likely a coward if he think there are consequences. This is also how he gets the TACO nickname.
That also depends on Europe's leaders not being beholden to the same international oligarchs who pull Trump's strings.
This is the limiting factor. A non-trivial number of them are in cahoots. Not always and necessarily directly, but American capital has its tentacles stuck into many industries and financials structures through which to exert influence over industry and politics.
Seems like EU has no problem issuing fines to major American IT companies.
EU has lots of options to retaliate against USA
They do indeed. Aren't they like the third largest economic market in the world? They can make it really sting if they're motivated.
Europe is indeed the third largest economy in the world, but EU is the global leader in trade.
Well, yeah, but the EU could go for retaliatory tariffs again, which could put huge economic pressure on the US, hopefully forcing Trump's hand into honouring the deal.
I wonder if EU will have enough spine this time. We can tariff the digital services...
That's the one that will really hurt (the right people) - Canada and EU dropping US copyright would hurt too, and if all else fails, just dump Treasuries
As a US citizen... Dropping us copyright would be a critical blow. Don't enforce rights on tv/novies/games/music would crumble the economy. I'm not against it but yeah, that's a nuke to the economy.
AFAIK it has actually been suggested that EU could drop American patents, to create a competitive IT infrastructure without USA.
I suppose copyright could be a logical follow up.
Wouldn't most of these big corporations have also filed for European patents?
If they haven't, they don't count in Europe anyway.
Unfortunately the EU has no say in the tariffs that the US charges its own citizens
They can say:
"Since US Consumers can pay 15% more, we've decided to implement a 15% export fee to any product to the US."
That takes the "power" away from trump, he can raise the price as much as he wants but he becomes powerless to lower it.
Almost every "American" product is at best assembled components, and each one of those components can be hit by export fees by the country that makes them.
It's a very easy movie, almost guaranteed to work, and makes them money. I don't know why they're not doing it.
It's a very easy movie, almost guaranteed to work, and makes them money. I don't know why they're not doing it.
Probably because export tariffs make your product less appealing to import compared to other potential competing exporters who don't collude on an export tax, or the target country who might be incentives to produce domestically instead of importing. Obviously, some industries are more geographically locked than others, but these deals still have knock on effects.
Trump is so weak, they should capitalize on this moment.
"He's so weak, it's laughable"
- Donald Trump (on Jeb Bush), 2016.