I quote a German blogger Julian Reichelt. “The Voice of the Revolution” I would call him the brains from Germany. To understand this story you have virtually to move to the country. I lived there 30yrs so no problem for me. But the story covers the whole of Europe!

“Donald Trump is imposing historic tariffs, and the EU is vowing revenge. The ultimate goal is to hit the American digital industry, which in recent weeks has also declared the era of digital censorship over, thus endangering the power of party rule from Berlin to Brussels. New media, new parties – Europe’s political failures would like to suppress all of this with all their might because they arrived too late and are currently being punished by life. Before succumbing to megalomania and wanting to show the Americans what they’re made of, there are a few things that should be considered, especially in Berlin:

  1. We don’t even have enough energy in Germany to power new technologies like AI and quantum computers. These technologies require massive, stable base loads. They only work with nuclear power. We are currently shutting down the digital age in Germany for good. The nuclear phase-out is, in fact, a phase-out of digital technology. Meta is currently planning its own nuclear power plant in the USA. All the wind turbines and solar plants in Germany would not be enough to cover the digital electricity needs of the future alone.
  2. The smartphone is the technological driver of the 21st century, the basic technology. The USA, Korea, and China have their own technology, the EU does not. There is no relevant European smartphone. We can no longer produce what the world wants and what we ourselves need to survive. Without smartphones, we would be economically dead – and we don’t have one.
  3. Data, the gold mine of our time, has become an American-Chinese duopoly. Europe lies in between, far behind and proud of its data protection regulations.
  4. Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Huawei, and Alibaba (and that’s by no means all of them) are more valuable than everything all EU states have created combined since 1989. The digital miracle in West and East finances the Museum of Europe. We sell products from the past to people of tomorrow.
  5. From intelligence services to air defense, from data fusion to GPS, satellites, target acquisition to SIGINT reconnaissance, from logistics to firepower, Europe simply no longer exists as a self-defense force. Everything, absolutely everything, that makes our (relatively) secure life of freedom and prosperity possible is American technology. When it comes to military aviation, we are decades behind. Without US technology, we wouldn’t notice approaching Chinese jets and Russian missiles until it reaches 3,000 degrees Celsius in Berlin.
  6. The world’s digital payment flows bypass Europe. PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Alipay – there is nothing comparable in the EU. When we pay at the supermarket, our money flows through the US (and in the future, through China). Without America, we could hardly buy carrots (digitally).
  7. The fines that Great Britain had to pay to the EU for Brexit were lower than the amount that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid to his ex-wife for his divorce. If the EU seriously believes it can intimidate unpopular tech moguls like Elon Musk with a few hundred million or even a few billion in fines, Brussels (and Berlin) clearly have no understanding of the American prosperity explosion fueled by Big Tech and Big Oil. There are more Gulfstreams parked at many small US airports than there are VW Golfs in our Aldi parking lot.

Before Friedrich Merz and Ursula von der Leyen have pulled their swords to threaten Donald Trump and America with tariff retaliation, they should consider this again: The only thing that is better in Europe than in America (and China) are our cars, which we have unfortunately banned, and our castles and palaces, which are hundreds of years old.

As it was a large translation, I might have made some mistakes.

Theo R.