The security of democracies no longer depends only on military alliances or trade relations. It increasingly depends on the technological relationship between Europe and the United States.
Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, semiconductors, and digital infrastructures are reshaping global power balances at a speed rarely seen before. In just a few years, artificial intelligence has moved from solving school-level tests to addressing mathematical problems that remained unsolved for generations of researchers. In the coming years, it will transform energy, defense, medicine, and industry through increasingly complex — and often opaque — decision-making systems.
The technological stack — from rare earth minerals to artificial intelligence models — has become the invisible backbone of geopolitical influence. In this context, trusted technologies are not an ethical slogan. They are the material foundation of political freedom: supply chains anchored in countries that share the rule of law and democratic governance.
As the US National Security Strategy notes, technological leadership depends on resilient ecosystems built with allies and on reducing coercive dependencies. The challenge to democracies comes from two directions.
On one side, authoritarian powers — led by China — integrate state policy, industry, and research to dominate the upstream segments of the value chain: standards, platforms, and critical components. They combine the strength of their domestic market with external expansion strategies.
On the other side, divided democracies risk relying on a handful of global private champions capable of vertically integrating connectivity, cloud services, and artificial intelligence. In such a scenario, economic efficiency can gradually translate into de facto political power.
Without collective action, democracies could find themselves caught between geopolitical coercion and dependence on irreplaceable technological platforms. Technology would slowly cease to be an instrument of freedom and instead become a mechanism of control.
Acting together is also essential for another reason: ensuring that technologies whose complexity may soon exceed full human understanding remain governable through democratic institutions and public accountability. For Washington, Europe is indispensable.
Even when working with Indo-Pacific allies, the United States alone would struggle to reach the scale required to compete across the entire technological stack. Without the European Union, reducing dependence on China for critical minerals becomes more difficult, as does consolidating leadership in advanced semiconductors and strengthening robotics and industrial manufacturing.
Despite the manufacturing weaknesses highlighted in the Draghi report — which has exposed strategic vulnerabilities along the technological value chain — Europe still possesses crucial assets: highly skilled talent, key industrial nodes ranging from chip lithography to microelectronics and emerging 6G technologies, and a market representing roughly 20% of global demand for advanced digital technologies.
Meanwhile, the United States is moving rapidly thanks to massive private investments and federal policies designed to accelerate technological adoption and the localization of strategic assets. This trajectory is likely to continue beyond political cycles.
In this context, many European digital regulations — sometimes perceived in Washington as hostile — often reflect a fragmented governance structure within the EU that struggles to match the complexity of the technological moment. In many cases, these rules have ultimately penalized European industry itself, increasing technological dependencies rather than reducing them.
A Europe weakened within the technological stack reinforces a scenario in which the standards, rules, and architectures of critical technologies are written either in Beijing or in the boardrooms of a small number of global platforms.
In response, proposals for a form of European digital sovereignty detached from the United States risk becoming another strategic mistake. In a post-globalization world, strategic autonomy does not mean self-sufficiency. It means the ability to make independent choices within an interdependent system, free from coercion.
Europe’s objective should therefore be to progressively increase its weight within trusted supply chains. Achieving this requires significant regulatory simplification and continental-scale industrial policies capable of nurturing highly specialized and difficult-to-replace ecosystems — such as ASML’s leadership in semiconductor lithography.
Without a credible response, Europe’s relative decline could accelerate. In that scenario, the most dynamic democracies may begin organizing themselves into functional federations — potentially including partners such as Norway or Canada — built around shared industrial policies, security frameworks, and defense cooperation.
Trusted technologies offer Europe a practical path forward. This approach means verifiable suppliers, transparent supply chains, and open and reversible standards, ensuring that no single private actor captures both upstream value and downstream leverage.
The experience of 5G has already demonstrated that when democracies coordinate procurement strategies and diplomatic action, markets shift toward reliable solutions without closing themselves to trade. The same logic should guide cooperation in artificial intelligence, space technologies, and quantum computing.
From this perspective, Italy has promoted in Washington a dialogue open to European partners aimed at encouraging coordinated action. If democracies can think and invest together, technology will remain an extension of freedom. If they remain divided, it may become the opposite. The transatlantic alliance was created to defend the free world. Today it must reinvent itself — and do so quickly — to defend freedom in the age of algorithms.
