The Full-Stack Decoupling

In April, Microsoft canceled the email account of the International Criminal Court's prosecutor after the United States imposed sanctions on the court. A foreign government had exercised a kill switch over European institutional infrastructure, and the lesson was not lost on Brussels: any layer of American-controlled software was a security vulnerability ^[1]. The same month, the Pentagon disclosed that the Iran campaign had depleted 45 to 80 percent of its critical missile stocks — THAAD, Patriot, Tomahawk, PrSM — and deliveries to Baltic and Scandinavian allies were delayed indefinitely ^[2][3]. The American security guarantee had a hard physical ceiling. One event was civilian, the other military. They taught the same lesson. And the European Union has responded by treating them as a single problem. The evidence is now visible at every layer of the technology stack, from the software on civil servants' desks to the drones over Ukraine. What connects them is not just a mood of transatlantic estrangement but an institutional logic: any dependency on American-controlled infrastructure is a vulnerability, and the remedy is to build European alternatives at every layer where one exists. Start at the bottom, with office software. The European Parliament replaced Google with the French search engine Qwant as its default. The EU institutions are ditching Microsoft Office for European and open-source alternatives ^[4]. France is moving 2.5 million civil servants to a domestic videoconferencing app, and Germany has mandated open-source document formats ^[5]. These are not symbolic gestures. They are procurement decisions that redirect public money away from American firms and toward European ones, and they are happening now. One layer up sits the cloud. In April, the European Commission awarded a 180-million-euro sovereign cloud contract exclusively to European providers — OVHcloud, Clever Cloud, Scaleway, Proximus ^[6]. The trigger was not merely policy preference. Hackers had just stolen 90 gigabytes of Commission data through an AWS security breach, and the contract explicitly excluded non-European providers from the most sensitive workloads. The EU is also building Gaia-X, a federated cloud infrastructure meant as a long-term alternative to American hyperscalers ^[4]. In June, the EU designated AWS and Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, requiring data portability and banning self-preferencing ^[7]. The regulatory tool and the procurement tool are working in tandem: antitrust law is being used to dismantle the lock-in that procurement alone cannot break. The Technological Sovereignty Package, unveiled the same month, went further, restricting foreign cloud providers from public tenders in defense, healthcare, banking, and energy ^[1]. Then comes payments. The digital euro, backed by the European Parliament's economic affairs committee in June, is explicitly framed as a project to reduce reliance on Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, and Google Pay ^[8]. The argument is no longer just about monetary policy. It is about who controls the pipes through which European money flows. Above payments, the stack enters the military domain. In May, the EU launched a drone alliance with Ukraine, aiming to build comprehensive European drone and counter-drone capabilities operational by the end of this year ^[9]. Germany and Ukraine are co-producing drones through the Build with Ukraine initiative, with German officials calling it a central foundation for Europe's future defence capabilities ^[10]. Zelenskyy has launched "drone deals" exporting Ukrainian military technology to Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, and beyond ^[11]. Taiwan's drone exports to Europe surged 41.7-fold between 2024 and 2025, routed through Poland and the Czech Republic to build a supply chain that bypasses Chinese dual-use components ^[12]. Ukraine's battlefield experience is being absorbed as European industrial capacity, and the supply lines are being rewired around it. At the top of the stack sits missile defense. The United Kingdom's Project Brakestop developed long-range missiles deliberately free from US International Traffic in Arms Regulations, ensuring that no American legal chokepoint can block their use ^[13]. This week, ten European nations plus Ukraine formed an Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition with a joint research and development program — the first purely European missile defense architecture independent of American systems ^[14]. What makes this a single project rather than a collection of parallel initiatives is the institutional architecture. In June, the EU passed the Defence Readiness Omnibus, an 800-billion-euro framework over four years that cuts defense permit times from up to four years to 100 days and introduces general transfer licenses for defense products between member states ^[15]. The European Defence Fund awarded 1.07 billion euros concentrated in AI, cyber defense, space systems, unmanned technologies, and loitering munitions — the same digital domains where the EU is pursuing civilian tech sovereignty ^[16]. And the commissioner responsible for all of it, Henna Virkkunen, holds a title that did not exist before: Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy ^[15]. The portfolio merges what were once separate briefs — digital policy and defense — into a single institutional mandate. The stack is not accidental. It is designed. But the design runs ahead of the capacity. The decoupling is furthest along in the layers where European alternatives already exist: office software, cloud infrastructure, payment systems. At the frontier, the picture reverses. In May, the EU lobbied Washington for access to Anthropic's Mythos AI model for cybersecurity purposes. Europe cannot build an equivalent. The White House blocked the request ^[17]. Nokia's CEO, Justin Hotard, warned that Europe's AI investment pace is likely inadequate to keep up with the United States and China, arguing that without the infrastructure, businesses and developers will move to where it exists ^[18]. US Envoy Andrew Puzder made the American view explicit, arguing that Europe's strategy amounts to protectionism disguised as sovereignty and questioning whether it makes Europe more competitive or merely makes others less so ^[19]. The asymmetry is the story. Where a European alternative exists, the decoupling is real, funded, and advancing through procurement, regulation, and institutional redesign. Where one does not, Europe is still a supplicant, lobbying Washington for access to technology it cannot produce. The ambition is full-stack. The capacity is not yet.