‘Sovereignty’ is the fashionable word in the Brussels bubble and the member states’ capitals. It sounds serious, looks impressive on a lectern, and travels well in official language. Yet the moment one leaves the stage and examines the machinery of the European Union economy, a harsher truth appears: in too many strategic sectors, Europe consumes what others control. Sometimes EU governments sell the family crown jewels to the U.S., as France did recently with LMB Aerospace.
This is not a morality play about allies and adversaries. It is a business problem with geopolitical consequences. Control of a chokepoint, an essential input, a dominant platform, a payment rail, or a design tool creates leverage and durable rents. It shapes who sets the terms, who enjoys pricing power, and who can apply pressure when politics turns cold. Europe’s most consequential dependencies today are concentrated in three external poles: the United States, China, and Russia, with Wall Street never far from the centre of gravity.
Let’s begin with energy, because energy is the original sovereign commodity. In the third quarter of 2025, Eurostat records an American supplier of 59.9% of the Union’s liquefied natural gas imports, while the Russian share stood at 12.7%. In January 2026, reporting based on market-tracking data again put the American share at 60% of Europe’s LNG. Europe has reduced one vulnerability, but it has not escaped the structural risk of concentration. A dominant supplier—whoever it is—sets the tone in price negotiations and defines the comfort margin in a crisis.
Defence reveals the same dependence in a sharper light. Europe is rearming, yet procurement patterns still point outward. SIPRI reports that American suppliers accounted for 64% of arms imports by NATO European states in 2020–24. This is not merely a question of buying equipment. It is a question of maintenance chains, spare parts, software updates, ammunition stocks, standards, and interoperability requirements that lock in reliance for years.
The dependency that hides in plain sight is digital infrastructure. In cloud computing, a study summarised by the European Parliament states that Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud hold about 70% of the Union’s cloud infrastructure market, while the combined share of European providers had fallen to roughly 13% by 2022. Cloud is not ‘IT.’ It is the operating layer of public administration and modern industry. When that operating layer is external, sovereignty becomes a compliance strategy rather than a capability.
Payments are the quieter cousin of cloud, but no less strategic. The European Central Bank reports that in 2022 international card schemes accounted for approximately 61% of euro area card payments. That share is not just a market statistic; it is reliance on non-European rails for everyday commerce. It is therefore politically telling that Valdis Dombrovskis has argued for a digital euro to reduce dependence on American payment giants such as Visa and Mastercard. When daily consumption runs through external toll booths, the language of sovereignty should, at minimum, become a serious financial conversation.
Semiconductors are often discussed as a manufacturing capacity challenge, but one of the key chokepoints sits upstream in design. A European Commission analysis of the semiconductor ecosystem notes that many European companies remain dependent on electronic design automation tool leaders Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys. This matters because advanced design depends on specialised software, libraries and licensing. You may subsidise production, but if the design layer is vulnerable to external constraint, resilience is still rented rather than owned.
Finally, Europe’s green transition and its security needs collide with the hard reality of materials and industrial scale. The Council of the European Union states that Chinese suppliers provide almost all the Union’s supply of heavy rare earth elements. EU statistics show Chinese suppliers also accounted for 98% of extra-EU imports of solar panels in 2024. And EU guidance documents state that in 2024 the Union imported around €28 billion worth of batteries, of which €22 billion came from Chinese suppliers alone. This is not a temporary supply-chain irritation; it is structural dependence at the level of inputs, processing and manufacturing capacity.
If this were simply a catalogue of external dependencies, it would already be serious. What turns it into an editorial indictment is that Europe also manufactures dependency through its own choices by selling control of sensitive capabilities and then presenting legal safeguards as a substitute for ownership.
Consider the most recent French case of LMB Aerospace. French reporting states that its acquisition by the American Loar Group was concluded at the end of December 2025 for €367 million. Reporting also notes that the company produces fans for the Rafale and for nuclear submarines, and that the government authorised the sale while Roland Lescure insisted production would continue domestically and that the state could block strategic decisions. This leads to the question that Europe keeps postponing. How does one propose to protect European industrial and financial sovereignty against American dominance if governments – and France first among them – are willing to sell the crown jewels of national industry, including in defence, and then ask citizens to admire the protective clauses? You cannot build autonomy with press releases while outsourcing ownership in practice. You cannot claim to be reducing dependency while reinforcing structural reliance on the very systems that underpin security, technology, and capital flows.
None of this requires hostility towards allies, nor fantasies of autarky. It requires basic strategic discipline: treat the bottlenecks as strategic infrastructure and behave accordingly. In the modern economy, sovereignty is not a mood. It is the ability to sustain critical functions under pressure, to negotiate from optionality rather than necessity, and to ensure that the dividends of Europe’s security and technological needs do not systematically accrue elsewhere.
The bottom line is therefore unglamorous but decisive. If Europe does not take back industrial and financial sovereignty in the sectors that define modern power—energy, defence supply chains, cloud, payments, semiconductors, and the materials and manufacturing base of the transition—nothing will change. The rhetoric may become more refined. The dependency will remain the operating system.
Sovereignty by Slogan, Dependency by Contract
euconedit
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‘Sovereignty’ is the fashionable word in the Brussels bubble and the member states’ capitals. It sounds serious, looks impressive on a lectern, and travels well in official language. Yet the moment one leaves the stage and examines the machinery of the European Union economy, a harsher truth appears: in too many strategic sectors, Europe consumes what others control. Sometimes EU governments sell the family crown jewels to the U.S., as France did recently with LMB Aerospace.
This is not a morality play about allies and adversaries. It is a business problem with geopolitical consequences. Control of a chokepoint, an essential input, a dominant platform, a payment rail, or a design tool creates leverage and durable rents. It shapes who sets the terms, who enjoys pricing power, and who can apply pressure when politics turns cold. Europe’s most consequential dependencies today are concentrated in three external poles: the United States, China, and Russia, with Wall Street never far from the centre of gravity.
Let’s begin with energy, because energy is the original sovereign commodity. In the third quarter of 2025, Eurostat records an American supplier of 59.9% of the Union’s liquefied natural gas imports, while the Russian share stood at 12.7%. In January 2026, reporting based on market-tracking data again put the American share at 60% of Europe’s LNG. Europe has reduced one vulnerability, but it has not escaped the structural risk of concentration. A dominant supplier—whoever it is—sets the tone in price negotiations and defines the comfort margin in a crisis.
Defence reveals the same dependence in a sharper light. Europe is rearming, yet procurement patterns still point outward. SIPRI reports that American suppliers accounted for 64% of arms imports by NATO European states in 2020–24. This is not merely a question of buying equipment. It is a question of maintenance chains, spare parts, software updates, ammunition stocks, standards, and interoperability requirements that lock in reliance for years.
The dependency that hides in plain sight is digital infrastructure. In cloud computing, a study summarised by the European Parliament states that Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud hold about 70% of the Union’s cloud infrastructure market, while the combined share of European providers had fallen to roughly 13% by 2022. Cloud is not ‘IT.’ It is the operating layer of public administration and modern industry. When that operating layer is external, sovereignty becomes a compliance strategy rather than a capability.
Payments are the quieter cousin of cloud, but no less strategic. The European Central Bank reports that in 2022 international card schemes accounted for approximately 61% of euro area card payments. That share is not just a market statistic; it is reliance on non-European rails for everyday commerce. It is therefore politically telling that Valdis Dombrovskis has argued for a digital euro to reduce dependence on American payment giants such as Visa and Mastercard. When daily consumption runs through external toll booths, the language of sovereignty should, at minimum, become a serious financial conversation.
Semiconductors are often discussed as a manufacturing capacity challenge, but one of the key chokepoints sits upstream in design. A European Commission analysis of the semiconductor ecosystem notes that many European companies remain dependent on electronic design automation tool leaders Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys. This matters because advanced design depends on specialised software, libraries and licensing. You may subsidise production, but if the design layer is vulnerable to external constraint, resilience is still rented rather than owned.
Finally, Europe’s green transition and its security needs collide with the hard reality of materials and industrial scale. The Council of the European Union states that Chinese suppliers provide almost all the Union’s supply of heavy rare earth elements. EU statistics show Chinese suppliers also accounted for 98% of extra-EU imports of solar panels in 2024. And EU guidance documents state that in 2024 the Union imported around €28 billion worth of batteries, of which €22 billion came from Chinese suppliers alone. This is not a temporary supply-chain irritation; it is structural dependence at the level of inputs, processing and manufacturing capacity.
If this were simply a catalogue of external dependencies, it would already be serious. What turns it into an editorial indictment is that Europe also manufactures dependency through its own choices by selling control of sensitive capabilities and then presenting legal safeguards as a substitute for ownership.
Consider the most recent French case of LMB Aerospace. French reporting states that its acquisition by the American Loar Group was concluded at the end of December 2025 for €367 million. Reporting also notes that the company produces fans for the Rafale and for nuclear submarines, and that the government authorised the sale while Roland Lescure insisted production would continue domestically and that the state could block strategic decisions. This leads to the question that Europe keeps postponing. How does one propose to protect European industrial and financial sovereignty against American dominance if governments – and France first among them – are willing to sell the crown jewels of national industry, including in defence, and then ask citizens to admire the protective clauses? You cannot build autonomy with press releases while outsourcing ownership in practice. You cannot claim to be reducing dependency while reinforcing structural reliance on the very systems that underpin security, technology, and capital flows.
None of this requires hostility towards allies, nor fantasies of autarky. It requires basic strategic discipline: treat the bottlenecks as strategic infrastructure and behave accordingly. In the modern economy, sovereignty is not a mood. It is the ability to sustain critical functions under pressure, to negotiate from optionality rather than necessity, and to ensure that the dividends of Europe’s security and technological needs do not systematically accrue elsewhere.
The bottom line is therefore unglamorous but decisive. If Europe does not take back industrial and financial sovereignty in the sectors that define modern power—energy, defence supply chains, cloud, payments, semiconductors, and the materials and manufacturing base of the transition—nothing will change. The rhetoric may become more refined. The dependency will remain the operating system.
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