Sunday afternoon. My son's birthday. The kids are tearing up the playground, the women are chatting, and we men sit at the table. All IT-affiliated. All people who understand systems, evaluate infrastructure, and are confronted daily with the question: Which technology is secure enough? Trustworthy enough? Independent enough?

The conversation quickly drifts from small everyday problems to big geopolitical questions: Microsoft, US cloud providers, the "surveillance bubble" — and the worry that Europe is too dependent on the US. The mood gets agitated. Someone says: "We need to become independent. They can just shut us down!"

I ask the group: "What exactly are you afraid of?"

The answer comes promptly: Political arbitrariness. The fear that the unpredictable US president could decide tomorrow to cut off power to European companies. Fear of an authority that acts not by rules, but by whim.

The Emotional Root of a Technical Debate

This fear is real. It is understandable. Anyone observing the current geopolitical situation indeed gets "a little scared." But this is exactly where the problem begins: When fear determines strategy, you don't get good policy. And certainly not good IT strategy.

The demand for full digital sovereignty, born reflexively from this fear, ignores a harsh economic and technological reality. It is an emotional reaction to political discomfort — not a rational assessment of what is actually feasible.

The participants argue for decoupling. Away from Microsoft, away from US cloud scalers, away from dependency. They plead for autarky.

Autarky at any price is not a strategy. It is an illusion.

The Hard Calculation: What Europe Can (and Cannot) Actually Do

Let's put the thesis of full digital sovereignty to the test.

Yes, there are areas where Europe can develop or already has alternatives. Office applications, collaboration tools, some infrastructure components — here we are not helpless.

But in complex, deeply integrated systems, the world looks very different. Take the security stack of Microsoft 365 Business Premium — an ecosystem of identity management, threat protection, data loss prevention, and endpoint security, offered for around €20 per user per month.

An equivalent European product? It does not exist. And it will not exist for the foreseeable future. The US has a lead of about 20 years in this area — built through massive private and public investment, a dynamic market, and decades of iteration.

Believing that Europe can simply catch up this deficit through political will and subsidies is a fallacy. It's like deciding to reinvent the wheel while the convoy is already speeding down the highway.

We have to admit it: We lost this race. That is not humiliating defeat. It is simply realism.

Asymmetric Strategy Instead of Hopeless Catch-Up

If symmetric competition — the attempt to beat the US in their own areas of strength — leads to strategic suicide, what remains?

The answer: Asymmetric investment.

Instead of sinking billions into hopeless replicas of American cloud infrastructure, Europe should accept where it falls short and channel its resources to where there are realistic chances. Areas where we are already strong or can build a genuine leadership position.

One example: Specialized AI models. Initiatives like Mistral in France show that Europe is indeed capable of developing cutting-edge technology — if we focus not on the broad mass, but on niches where we can differentiate.

The goal should not be total independence, but mutual dependency. A world where American companies rely on European technology just as much as vice versa. Because in a globally networked world, real stability is not based on isolation, but on interdependence.

Sweeping Enemy Stereotypes Are Not Analysis

Another point that occupied me that afternoon: The willingness to demonize America wholesale. "Americans are dangerous. The US is not trustworthy."

But are all Americans really "evil"? Around 50% of the US population did not vote for the current president. Just as not all Russians are responsible for the war in Ukraine, the American nation is not a monolithic block of enemies. Thinking this way falls into childish splitting: Dividing the world into good and evil may be comforting in times of crisis, but it is intellectually dishonest and strategically counterproductive.

The same applies to Europe's romanticized self-perception. Yes, we have strict data protection laws. But we also had Wirecard. We had regulatory control failures of remarkable magnitude. European states and companies are not perfect either. Inventing moral superiority to compensate for technological backwardness is a convenient but dangerous excuse.

The Bird's Eye View: When the Bubble Breeds Fear

The speaker in us (or maybe it was myself) said something very wise that afternoon: "You have to look at it with a bird's eye view, and not get stuck inside the bubble."

The "bubble" here is not just the media echo chamber. It is also the collective affective space where technicians, politicians, and anxious people mutually escalate into narrative doomsday thinking. The more you move within this bubble, the more inevitable the total catastrophe appears — and the more urgent the total decoupling seems.

The bird's eye view means: Gain distance. Recognize the emotion, but don't let it lead you. Ask questions like: What is realistic? What is affordable? What is technologically feasible? And what is merely the projection of our own powerlessness onto an external enemy image?

Conclusion: Realism as Strategy

The debate about digital sovereignty is important. Necessary. And highly complex. But it must not be dominated by fear. Whoever calls for full autarky out of fear of political arbitrariness wastes resources, pursues unattainable goals, and ignores the reality of an interconnected world.

Europe must stop feeding the narrative of the catch-up race. We will not conquer the US cloud market. We will not develop our own security stack in two years that can compete with the ecosystem of global players. And that is okay.

Instead, we should identify our strengths and expand them strategically. We should rely on mutual dependency, on contracts, on convergence of interests — not on the illusion that one can survive in isolation in a networked world.

Security does not arise from total control. It arises from realistic assessment, mutual bonds, and the ability to tolerate ambivalence.

The world is not perfect. Not America. Not Europe. Not technology. But it is the only place we have to work with. So let's not be driven by fear, but by strategy.

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