Europe and the U.S. \u201cface the same sort of threat and the same threat actors,\u201d said Cairncross, who advises Trump on cybersecurity policy. Rather than weaning off America, wean off China,\u00a0he said: \u201cThere is a clean tech stack. It is primarily American. And then there is a Chinese tech stack.\u201d<\/p>\n
Claiming that U.S. tech is as risky as Chinese tech is \u201ca giant false equivalency,\u201d according to Cairncross. \u201cPersonal data doesn\u2019t get piped to the state in the United States,\u201d he said, referencing concerns that the Beijing government has laws requiring firms to hand over data for Chinese surveillance and espionage purposes.<\/p>\n
The attempt to quell concerns is notable even if it may not change the direction of travel in Europe. The European Commission wants to boost homegrown technology with a \u201ctech sovereignty\u201d package this spring. It presented a cybersecurity proposal in January that, if approved, could be used to root out suppliers that pose security risks \u2014 including from America.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to ensure that we don\u2019t have risky dependencies when it comes to critical sectors,\u201d the Commission\u2019s Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen told POLITICO in an interview in Munich on Friday. \u201cWe see this in AI, quantum technologies and semiconductors \u2014 we must have a certain level of capacity ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Europe\u2019s attempt to pivot away from U.S. dependencies, while not new, has gained support in past months as the transatlantic alliance creaked. The POLITICO Poll<\/a>\u00a0conducted in February showed far more people described the U.S. as an unreliable ally than a reliable one across four countries, including half the adults polled in Germany and 57 percent in Canada.<\/p>\n