DK_en 3x04 - Empire

Episode first aired on 21 May, 2025. Listen on Spreaker

I don't know if you've noticed, but something of unprecedented gravity is happening. And considering what's happening in Gaza, the bar's set pretty high already.

AUDIO: DK Theme

In January, Trump opened his term with a deluge of Executive Orders.

We all remember two of them:

• the one to rename the Gulf of Mexico into Gulf of America, and
• the one giving a green light to Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

We remember them because, as far as comedic value goes, they are very hard to top.

On the other hand, the one against the International Criminal Court I guiltily disregarded.

Just for context: the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, is an international judicial body that deals exclusively with crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and crimes of aggression between states.

In May 2024, the Court announced that it would seek arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity;

• for Hamas leaders Sinwar, Deif and Haniyeh for the attack of 7 October, 2023; and
• for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and his Defense Minister Gallant, for the manner in which the Gaza invasion has been and is being conducted.

Worldwide, 125 states have signed on to the ICC and recognize its authority.

Among them are not Russia and China. Also, since the Court is tasked with enforcing order through shared rules, the United States, famous defenders of the rules-based world order, are also not among the signatories.

This has not stopped the current President of the United States from branding the Court with anti-Semitism and imposing sanctions on its Chief Prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan, a British citizen.

And here's the kicker.

The executive order not only freezes any property and funds of Khan in the United States, it also freezes US property and funds of, and I quote:

any foreign person that the Secretary of State determines, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General:
...
(B) have materially assisted, financed, or provided financial, material, or technological support, or goods or services...

What does this mean, simply put? It means that, for example, Microsoft blocked Khan's e-mail services. It's still not clear to me, because the news reports don't say anything about it, whether the blocking affects only Khan or the entire Court.

Since all these details may shadow how serious this all is, let's make a quick summary:

• the International Criminal Court is a transnational body based in The Hague, Netherlands;
• the U.S. is not a member of the ICC and does not recognize its authority;
• the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC pays for mail services to Microsoft, either in Holland where he works or in the UK where he has citizenship;
• Microsoft (Holland or UK), as it is under control of the U.S. parent company feels it has a duty to comply with the EO, and stops providing services to Mr. Khan;
• as a direct consequence, the Court's work is halted.

The news report the Microsoft issue, but we should remember that VISA, Mastercard and SWIFT are also under American control. If they too did the same, the Court could no longer pay employees and suppliers except in cash.

Incidentally, it is not that VISA, MasterCard and SWIFT are new to this little game, they did exactly that in 2010 when the Wikileaks people dared to show the world a U.S. helicopter indiscriminately machine-gunning a dozen unarmed civilians, including two reporters from the Reuters news agency. The video was called Collateral Murder, remember?

And so, for providing irrefutable evidence of a U.S. war crime, Wikileaks had all major funding channels, providentially all in American hands, shut down.

pause

But back to us. The bottom line is that, as of today, European branches of American companies are, for all intents and purposes, direct extensions of Trump's power. Foreign agents, pure and simple.

Of course, they always have been, technically. It's not like Trump invented sanctions, Executive Orders or the US CLOUD Act.

The only difference is that until yesterday we Europeans were on the same side lending a hand against Somebody Else, and we thought we'd never be this Somebody Else.

Well, now the US have changed their minds. And if they go to such lengths to protect their genocidal buddy Netanyahu, imagine if at some point they had to defend their own direct interests.

But Americans, at least, are looking out for their own interests. We Europeans, on the other hand, what are we going to do?

In the past decade, not content with depending entirely on american software, we put all the data we could, public or private, into the US cloud.

In the UK, Palantir is in charge of NHS data, for chrissake.

Don't the wafflers in government and i Parliament, constantly filling their mouths with words like “sovereignty” and “strategic independence” have anything to say?

Isn't there anyone in Brussels who's fed up with this Commission of out-of-time Atlanticists sucking up to people who treat us like a colony?

I mean these are the same trusted allies who were tapping Merkel's phone, infiltrating Belgian Telecom and so on. They have a track record.

And it's not like it's an entirely political decision, our own laws have already spoken:
the European Data Protection Supervisor has already ruled that the EU Commission and Parliament cannot use Microsoft 365, for example, because there is no way to configure it to make it GDPR compliant.

What are we waiting for?

Exactly where are we willing to draw a line?

pause

Last January, the European DORA regulation went into effect, establishing measures to ensure digital operational resilience for the finance industry.

Simply put, every company in the financial sector must have operational readiness plans in place in the event of a disruption in the provision of one or more critical services. That means being able to hot-migrate their cloud, for example, from Amazon to Google, in case Amazon's services are compromised.

The purpose of the regulation is to promote the resilience of the financial system to cyberattacks.

But now that the U.S. is revealed for the empire that it is, being able to hot migrate from Amazon to Google is like going from the frying pan into the fire.

Worrying about cyber attacks is no longer enough. We have geopolitical attacks too.

Europe will have some real level of resilience only when our critical services, our utilities, public administrations, and every industry are independent of critical suppliers under U.S. control.

Because now that the U.S. has taken off its mask, trust is no longer an option.

Another example: the entire digital payments infrastructure is in American hands. Not just major credit cards, but the SWIFT system for interbank and transnational payments.

This means the entirety of our economies is a US hostage.

Russia, whose access to SWIFT was blocked by post-Ukraine sanctions, has created its own alternative system, called SPFS. China has also made its own cross-border payments system, CIPS, interconnected with Russia's. India and the BRICS are doing the same thing.

Only we Europeans keep pretending to be Americans.

The entire European continent is right now facing DORA-level criticality for all its industries, not just the financial sector.

The only difference is that this is not a hacker attack, but a systemic problem, a geopolitical attack if you will.

And thanks to the last 30 years of suicidal digital policies, we have to build alternatives almost from scratch.

Fortunately, almost. We already have European alternatives to American cloud providers, OVH, Hetzner, and others. Sure, we have to scale them up. But that's nothing that simple money cannot solve.

We already have European alternatives to Google Docs, to Microsoft 365, to Gmail, to Outlook, to Slack, to Zoom. Faster, more secure, and above all based on open standards. Vendor lock-in? Thanks, but no more thanks.

Investing in all this, and doing it now, is the only way to ensure that European companies, and Europe itself, can maintain its own strategic independence and sovereignty in the face of an increasingly unpredictable U.S. empire in the hands of a manchild. The rest is talk.

There's only one problem: is anyone listening?