Europe and the US allies should foster positive cooperation in tech and security at every available level. It’s a tense time: questions of trust are top of mind in Europe and a trade war could erupt over the summer, creating what many call “giant elephants in the room.” But the benefits of cooperation are also too significant to ignore. Patience will be required. There are key meetings this month, first a G7 summit in Canada from June 15-17, followed by the NATO Summit in The Hague from June 24-25.
With these dates fast approaching, CEPA launched its first major public event in Brussels on June 5. CEPA President and CEO Alina Polyakova said that elephants had long threatened to trample on transatlantic unity — but she believed the alliance could survive the current challenges. Europe seems to be moving to meet the Trump administration’s demands to bolster its defenses and trim regulations. Whether it will be enough to satisfy Washington remains an unanswered question.
When CEPA was born two decades ago, it was the height of the Iraq War, and Americans “weren’t that welcome in some places, to say the least,” Polyakova explained in her opening remarks. “Despite the sometimes dramatic tensions that we have had between both partners, we have always stuck it out together, and we have come out better on the other side.”
For Europeans, a key issue is trust. If they buy American tech, will Washington be able to throw a kill switch? “The big elephant in the room, honestly, tends to be trust,” Polyakova said, opening her fireside chat with Google Head of Public Affairs Kharan Bhatia. We often hear a common question: Is the United States a reliable partner? And not just the US government, but US companies?
It is, Bhatia answered. Like other US companies, Google has invested billions in Europe, in data centers, subsea cables, Internet infrastructure, and research facilities. It has partnered with European companies to reassure Europeans about the safety of their data.
We “heard concerns about digital sovereignty in Europe, about the need for companies, and in particular, governments, to feel like they can control their data if it is placed with a US hyper-scaler,” Bhatia said. “So we offer all of our customers a level of control over their data, which “involves everything from locating physical data here, physically on our servers in Europe, to having encryption keys over the data.”
Tech and security are often considered separate endeavors. Yet CEPA believes they are becoming intricately connected. Artificial intelligence-powered devices, above all drones, are transforming the battlefield — a transformation highlighted by Ukraine’s successful Spider’s Web attack on Russian military airfields, which allowed drones costing as little as $600 to destroy 20-40 bombers worth as much as $7bn.
During the first panel, Piotr Błazeusz, Commanding General of the Eurocorps, Robert Geckle, Chairman and CEO of Airbus US, and Daniel Petrescu, the former Chief of Defense of the Romanian Armed Forces, urged NATO forces to speed up the development of autonomous weapons. Ukraine’s tech success shows that militaries must become permeable to transforming civilian tech.
“It’s all about dual-use,” said General Blazeusz. While the motto was military first, “we now need to say civilian first, and let’s see if we use it in the military later,” added Romania’s Petrescu. Ukraine has been able to innovate during wartime. “The West must bring the same innovation to its large military-industrial complex in peacetime,” added Airbus’s Gecke. “Cooperation in developing and integrating autonomous systems, including the lessons from Ukraine, could promote transatlantic cooperation.
Lorenz Meier, the CEO of AI software developer Auterion, offered an on-the-ground report from his company’s work with the Ukrainian industry. High school students working for 48 hours could have programmed the drones needed to carry out Spider’s Web, he argued. Getting them in trucks close to potential targets represented the real innovation.
A giant challenge is redirecting spending from high-cost fighter jet and tank programs to cheap drones. Many Western militaries remain reluctant to buy present-day technology, which they fear could soon be outdated by the time they are needed, and prefer to invest in research and development. Meier urged the West to buy one less submarine or plane and instead finance “mass purchases” of affordable autonomous weapons.
Another imperative is interoperability. The drones must be able to communicate and fight together, and cannot be separated by other languages and standards. At the conference, CEPA launched a paper detailing NATO’s need to improve data interoperability.
The concluding panel turned to economics. A new European Commission has taken power in Brussels. Its predecessor unleashed a wave of tech regulation. In contrast, the new body, while still unwilling to use the word deregulation, has called for a wave of simplification.
“The irony is that the mood music here in Europe is much more pro-Atlanticist than ever,” said Lucinda Creighton, former Irish Europe Minister and a CEPA Senior Fellow. “We have a very pro-innovation, a very pro-business sort of outlook.”
Europe has unveiled giant spending programs, including €800bn for defense. The change being demanded from Washington is now happening. “We need to accelerate it. We have big targets. You know, there’s 800 billion committed to investment in security and defense.”
All the panelists agreed with the new pro-competitive formula, though many warned that the “devil is in the details” and wondered whether Europe would actually be capable of “simplification.”
All also agreed that it would be counterproductive to avoid US technologies. Competitive European alternatives don’t exist. “We have no alternative but to work with and adopt US technology,” concluded Creighton.
The message is clear: Europe and America need each other. They are a couple experiencing marital difficulties. But most marriages experience rocky moments. Brussels struggles to understand the “Washington conversation,” while Washington struggles to understand the “Brussels conversation”, said CEPA Director Catherine Sendak as she closed the conference. “I hope we have been a bridge to some of those conversations.”
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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