Europe–United States: An Unequal Interdependence, Sector by Sector

The programme begins in orbit. More than half of the operational satellites circling the Earth belong not to a state but to an individual, Elon Musk, through his company Starlink. According to the programme, this satellite power makes Europeans, as well as Ukrainians, dependent on the United States. Ukrainian forces, for instance, need Musk's satellites to obtain precise geolocation of Russian troops so they can strike them more effectively, particularly with drones.

To catch up, Europe is betting on the IRIS² programme: 290 satellites in low and medium orbit, with deployment set to begin in 2028. The programme is designed primarily for governments and armed forces. The programme presents this example as a first illustration of European dependence, which it then sets out to assess area by area.

Trade between the European Union and the United States has nearly doubled in ten years. It amounted to the equivalent of €1,770 billion in 2025, making it the largest market in the world.

For EU countries, the United States is by far the top destination for goods exports, at €555 billion. It is followed by the United Kingdom (€346 billion), Switzerland (€219 billion) and China (€198 billion). In the other direction, the European Union is also the top destination for American goods, with €356 billion in exports in 2025, ahead of Mexico, Canada, China and the United Kingdom.

The gap of around €200 billion in Europe's favour in trade in goods is, according to Donald Trump, what would justify an import tax to rebalance the scales.

The programme immediately qualifies this picture. In the services market, the situation is reversed. The United States exports the equivalent of €522 billion in services to Europe, compared with €343 billion in the other direction, giving the US a surplus of €179 billion. If goods and services are added together, the balance remains in surplus for the European Union, but by only €20 billion, barely more than 1% of total trade. The argument of a massive imbalance in Europe's favour is thus put into perspective.

This American dominance in services rests above all on digital technology. According to the figures presented, 83% of European spending on software and online services goes to American companies. In online advertising, more than 60% of revenue is captured by the GAFAM, notably by the Google search engine, the social network Facebook and the video platform YouTube.

The energy sector also shows a large surplus for the United States. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin's troops, Russia's share of EU gas imports has fallen from 45% in 2021 to just 12% in 2025. Over the same period, the American share rose from 6% to 26%. The programme concludes that Europeans' energy dependence has partly shifted from Russia to the United States.

In the other direction, the European Union mainly sells high-value-added goods to Americans: luxury products, pharmaceuticals and, above all, cars. In 2025, 670,000 European passenger cars were exported to the United States, compared with 165,000 going the other way. The Volkswagen Group, which includes Audi and Porsche among others, accounts on its own for roughly a third of these exports. Add BMW and Mercedes-Benz, and the extent of Germany's exposure to American tariffs becomes clear.

Germany ranks first among the European countries that export the most to the United States, followed by Ireland and Italy. According to the programme, this dependence on the American market partly explains why these three countries wanted to reach a trade arrangement with Donald Trump quickly.

Donald Trump was threatening to raise tariffs from an average of 2.5% to 30%. On 27 July 2025, in Turnberry, Scotland, he negotiated an agreement with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. The agreement sets a rate of 15% on most imported goods, but only in the direction from the European Union to the United States. Most exports of American industrial products to the EU, by contrast, become tax-exempt. The agreement would also reportedly provide for Europeans to import €650 billion worth of fossil fuels by 2028.

The programme describes this agreement as "clearly" unfavourable to Europeans. It sees it as the result of the EU's dependence on American resources, a dominant position that Trump exploits. It then raises the question of what prospects Europe has for regaining the upper hand.

Two thirds of bank card transactions in the eurozone go through two American companies, Visa and Mastercard. Their network links banks together worldwide and, according to the programme, has no equivalent. It allows anyone to withdraw money or pay securely almost anywhere in the world.

Only nine European Union countries have their own payment system, such as France with Groupement des Cartes Bancaires or Germany with Girocard. Even in these cases, these systems only work for purchases made within the country.

According to the programme, this superiority exposes Europeans to the risk of payments being blocked for a state or an individual, simply on Washington's say-so. It cites the case of Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court. After international arrest warrants were issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, the Trump administration cut him off from all his means of payment. The programme interprets this decision as a way of deterring the ICC from investigating American officials or their Israeli allies.

It was to gain sovereignty that the European Union encouraged the creation of an independent payment system, Wero. Launched in 2024 in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, it enables transfers between individuals. It is eventually meant to support online payments and in-store purchases.

More broadly, since the Bretton Woods agreements at the end of the Second World War, the dollar has established itself as the reference currency of world trade. According to the programme, this economic dominance goes hand in hand with political dominance: for Washington, any transaction carried out in dollars effectively falls under American jurisdiction.

As a result, following the American embargoes on Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan, many European companies have been penalised for circumventing them. The example cited is BNP Paribas: in 2014, Washington imposed a record fine of $8.9 billion on the French bank.

Europe does, however, have its own lever. Every year, the European Union adopts dozens of laws on the environment, competition and data protection. Standards set in Brussels, for example to limit greenhouse gas emissions or planned obsolescence, are binding on international companies, including American ones, that want access to a market of 450 million consumers.

In the digital sphere, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) notably requires websites to ask for users' consent before using their personal data, for example for marketing purposes. The programme stresses that it was adopted despite intense lobbying by American tech giants. In 2023, Meta, Facebook's parent company founded by Mark Zuckerberg, was fined a record €1.2 billion by the EU for transferring Europeans' personal data to the United States in breach of the GDPR.

Compliance with the GDPR nonetheless remains difficult to monitor. Data travels through undersea cables that are increasingly owned by American tech giants, and it is then mostly stored in the United States, which has the majority of the world's data centres.

European companies and institutions therefore depend on this American infrastructure, including in strategic areas such as defence, energy and health. According to the programme, this exposes them to the risk of espionage. In the event of tensions with member states, Washington could even restrict European companies' or institutions' access to their own data.

To regain sovereignty, European states are encouraging data centres to be set up within the Union. The programme cites OVHcloud and Scaleway in France, Stackscale in Spain, Hetzner in Germany, Aruba Cloud in Italy and CloudFerro in Poland.

The last issue addressed is defence. To depend less on American equipment, particularly F-35 fighter jets, Europe has launched the ReArm Europe programme. It includes loan mechanisms for states so they can equip themselves with European hardware.

Finally, the programme notes that the American nuclear umbrella itself is being called into question. If that were the case, a new responsibility would fall to Europe's two nuclear powers, France and the United Kingdom. The programme ends on this observation, without saying how that responsibility might be taken on.