American foreign policy threatens American tech dominance
For years, America has held a unique power through its global technology dominance. The US has greatly benefited from this position, but historically, it has not been overtly exploited in ways that were blatantly only for America's benefit.
The past few months of foreign affairs show a new America (or perhaps the same old America, but one) that is willing to openly leverage global dependence on American business for its own ends. As an example, the use of tariffs as part of a multi-pronged effort to acquire Greenland. The world has responded quickly to American destabilisation - 35% of Britons see US as unfriendly or hostile to Europe.
The timing of this could not be worse... for American tech.
Just as the world is questioning its dependence on American technology, AI is making it genuinely possible to build alternatives.
The dependency
For decades, the world has been comprehensively dependent on American tech infrastructure. AWS for cloud. Microsoft for business productivity. Google for search. Apple for hardware. Salesforce for CRM.
This wasn't just preference — it was path dependency. The switching costs were astronomical. The network effects were unassailable. The talent was concentrated. European competitors have struggled to dent this dominance (for various reasons).
So everyone stayed. Even when they were uncomfortable. Even when they had strategic concerns.
The fracture
Recent American foreign policy has changed the calculus. Tariffs, sanctions, unpredictable export controls, and a general posture of transactional unreliability have finally created a long-deserved nervousness about total US-tech dependency.
This isn't ideological. It's risk management. When your critical infrastructure depends on a country that might (or is likely to!) take advantage of that criticality, you start looking for alternatives. The EU is talking seriously about digital sovereignty. Asia is accelerating local alternatives.
The self-inflicted wound
American tech dominance wasn't inevitable. It was built on decades of trust, stability, and openness. Companies chose American platforms because they were the best—but also because America was a reliable partner. Take Palantir - a historically problematic business which has still managed to win evermore critical, sensitive contracts with the UK government. It's now high on the political agenda [https://greenparty.org.uk/2026/01/22/zack-polanski-tells-defence-surveillance-corporation-palantir-to-pack-its-bags-and-get-the-hell-out-of-the-nhs/].
That reliability is now in question, and the questioning is happening at precisely the moment when switching became feasible. Five years ago, if you wanted to divest from American tech, you couldn't. The alternatives didn't exist, weren't good enough, or the reasons to divest of US tech didn't feel severe enough to justify the lift. Now? There is a unique window open to subvert this dominance.
The AI window
Here's why the timing is catastrophic for American tech dominance:
AI is still emergent. We haven't yet embedded AI into everything. The foundational decisions about which AI platforms, which models, which integrations will power the next generation of enterprise software are still being made. The concrete hasn't set. In five years time, we might see a world where the AI industry is unassaibly US-centric with the key players are down to just OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google (or other FAANGs through acquisition), but this is avoidable.
AI lowers the barrier to competition. It has never been easier to build sophisticated software. A competent team with modern AI tools can ship products that would have required 10x the headcount five years ago. The engineering talent gap—long America's moat—is narrowing. In particular, AI enables "good enough" - you don't need to match Salesforce feature-for-feature. You need to be good enough for European enterprises who'd rather have 80% of the functionality with none of the geopolitical risk.
The window won't stay open forever. Eventually, the next generation of AI-powered enterprise software will be built, deployed, and embedded. The decisions being made now about which platforms to build on, which vendors to trust, and which ecosystems to join will be sticky for decades.
America is giving the world reasons to choose differently at precisely the moment when choosing differently became possible.