Europe and the United States Should Stay Together for the Kids
Transatlantic unity received measured reaffirmation last month when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, “For the United States and Europe, we belong together.”
It came at a fateful moment. Growing tensions over trade, regulatory policy, and geopolitics have led to whispers of a U.S.-EU divorce even though both sides face an era-defining challenge from China’s longer-term bid for global techno-economic hegemony. The deepening rift over digital trade and regulatory policy has become an increasingly corrosive fault line in the relationship. If left unaddressed, it will fragment allied technological capacity at precisely the moment it needs to be unified. Together, the transatlantic alliance can shape the rules of the digital age. Divided, neither side stands a chance.
Rubio’s overture may help ease tensions, but rhetoric alone cannot bridge the gap. Strengthening the transatlantic alliance enough to meet the China challenge will require both sides to confront a specific, substantive source of friction: the growing divide over digital trade and technology regulation. Both must recognize what is causing pain, then make changes to save their marriage for the sake of their children and their children’s children.
From Washington’s perspective, the root of the problem is that the partnership has developed an uncomfortable asymmetry. As the world’s leading military power, the United States has long shouldered an outsized share of the alliance’s security burden. Yet, at a time when intensifying technological competition with China heightens the need for allied markets to function together cohesively, European regulatory policy often singles out American firms and subjects them to special scrutiny that constrains them from operating at the scale they need to continue innovating.
European authorities describe their rules governing digital technologies and markets as neutral and principled, but functionally they often appear to be anti-American. Digital competition frameworks overwhelmingly target U.S. platforms. Enforcement actions against U.S. firms rake in billions of dollars annually. Procurement and data rules privilege domestic capacity. Digital service taxes are structured to closely mirror American firms’ market share.
No single European policy measure defines the U.S. side’s grievance. The pattern does. America obviously cannot begrudge the EU’s prerogative to craft its own regulatory environment. The issue for the transatlantic alliance is whether regulatory outcomes reflect a level playing field and a shared strategic understanding of the techno-economic and geopolitical environment. Currently, that does not appear to be the case.
European policymakers see things differently. For them, the defining feature of the past two decades has not been regulatory overreach but structural overdependence on the American “tech stack.” Core digital infrastructure, popular platforms, and key technological ecosystems have developed largely by U.S. firms, giving them strong market positions. Meanwhile, those very digital technologies have become central to economic competitiveness, political influence, and national security. European policymakers worry this leaves them in a strategically precarious position.
Against that backdrop, regulatory authority stands out as one of the few domains in which Europe retains global leverage. European leaders do not present the decision to exercise that leverage as a rejection of the transatlantic partnership but as a condition for sustaining it. Cooperation grounded in asymmetrical dependence can endure in stable periods; they reason; it is more fragile in an era defined by geopolitical volatility.
But that argument belies deeper, more philosophical differences. Long before the EU enacted policies such as the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, many European policymakers already viewed America’s light-touch, market-driven regulatory model with ambivalence. But now they worry that, left unconstrained, U.S. tech platforms can shape public discourse, economic structure, and cultural life in ways that threaten European values. Rules governing data, competition, and digital markets therefore serve not only economic purposes but democratic ones.
From this vantage point, American objections to European regulation often appear less like calls for coordination than demands to subordinate domestic political priorities to external commercial interests. Efforts to build digital capacity at home and impose rules at scale thus reflect a desire to reduce vulnerability within an interdependent relationship rather than exiting it.
These divergent positions do not reflect bad faith. They reflect misaligned threat perception. Washington views transatlantic digital policy through the lens of systemic geopolitical competition. Europe views it through the lens of structural dependence and domestic legitimacy. Each side responds rationally to the environment it considers most urgent. Each assumes the other sees the same landscape.
That assumption increasingly fails.
This divergence carries consequences beyond the relationship itself. Allied technological capacity, the integrity of democratic governance systems, and the norms that will define the digital age all depend on whether the transatlantic alliance can hold together as a functional relationship. Fragmentation among advanced democracies does not produce parallel leadership; it redistributes influence over the rules that shape emerging technologies.
If transatlantic partners drift into separate regulatory and technological spheres, they will not divide the future between them. They will discover that key norms and infrastructures are taking shape elsewhere—most notably in systems advanced by China, which treats technological development as an integrated instrument of state power and international influence and is already exporting its governance model through digital infrastructure investments and multilateral institutions.
This is not alarmism. Technological ecosystems are not neutral terrain. Standards travel. Regulatory models replicate. When allies pull together, they shape the rules. When they pull apart, someone else does.
Stabilizing the transatlantic relationship therefore requires adjustments in interpretation as much as in policy substance. Europe will need to recognize that formally neutral rules can carry strategic meaning when they consistently shape the competitive position of allied firms. Acknowledging systemic effects does not require abandoning regulatory principles, but it does require evaluating them within a shared geopolitical context.
The United States, for its part, will need to recognize that Europe’s pursuit of digital autonomy reflects insecurity more than opportunism. That includes demonstrating consistency in its own policy commitments by sustaining engagement in multilateral digital governance forums and honoring negotiated frameworks rather than withdrawing from them unilaterally, as it did when the Biden administration pulled the United States out of two e-commerce negotiations in 2023. Pressure framed as a defense of fairness can register in Europe as an expectation of permanent technological dependence. The United States cannot expect closer coordination without also addressing Europe’s fears about dependence and unpredictability.
Neither regulatory convergence nor harmonization offers a realistic objective. The partners do not share identical political economies and need not attempt to construct them. Compatibility, not uniformity, provides the workable standard. Interoperable systems, transparent objectives, and consistent assessment of strategic consequences can sustain cooperation without erasing institutional individuality.
The United States and Europe face a choice familiar to any long-standing relationship under stress. They can continue interpreting each divergence as a new step toward an inevitable separation. Or they can accept that the consequences of a divorce would extend far beyond the partners themselves.
For the sake of future generations, the United States and Europe need not agree on everything. They do, however, need to agree on the kind of future they are helping to build.
The temptation in any strained partnership is to focus on winning the dispute. But the disputes are temporary. The consequences of fragmentation are not. Sometimes the most strategic decision is not to win the argument, but to stay together for the kids.
