Nobody at Dropbox will have noticed. It was one bloke moving a few gigabytes from one cloud-shaped box to another. But the reason I did it is a small symptom of something much bigger going on, and the bigger thing is worth a blog post.

I can't remember exactly when I signed up to Dropbox, but it was well over a decade ago. Back in 2008 it was one of those rare bits of software that solved a real problem without inventing three new ones: you put a file in a folder on one computer and it appeared on another, like magic. The launch demo pulled a waiting list of nearly 200,000 people, and the service eventually racked up hundreds of millions of users. The free tier was generous enough for my important files, the software just worked, and signing up required no thought whatsoever.

Leaving required rather more.

Proton, for the pedants, isn't an EU company. It's Swiss, domiciled in Geneva, with servers in Switzerland, Germany and Norway, and it encrypts everything end to end so that in theory the company itself can't read your files (Proton). All very nice, but the encryption wasn't the main attraction. The jurisdiction was.

The long arm of the cloud

America has a law called the CLOUD Act. In short, it means an American provider can be compelled through US legal process to hand over data in its possession or control, even when that data physically sits on a server outside the United States (Department of Justice). There are mechanisms for challenging orders, and it isn't a licence for officials to rummage through anyone's holiday photos on a whim. But the practical upshot is that storing European data in a European data centre doesn't put it beyond American legal reach if the company running the data centre is American.

For years that distinction felt academic. America was an ally, American tech was convenient, and the companies supplying it were assumed to operate within a broadly sane legal and political order.

Trump has changed all that. He didn't invent American self-interest, and no previous administration ran the country as an international charity. What he's done is say the quiet part out loud, repeatedly, and with evident relish: alliances are transactions, loyalty is conditional, and American power exists to squeeze advantage out of everyone else, closest friends included. "America First" is a slogan with a built-in corollary. If America is first, you aren't.

Once that principle gets applied openly to trade, defence and technology, buying from an American supplier stops being a routine commercial decision. It starts to look like a strategic dependency on a government that reserves the right to rewrite the relationship whenever it spots an angle. Trump hasn't deglobalised the world so much as Balkanised it, and the rest of the world is quietly redrawing its supply lines accordingly.

The supermarket takes on Amazon

I still have files and services on Amazon's AWS. They'll probably be next out the door.

One likely destination is STACKIT, the cloud business built by Schwarz Group, the German outfit behind Lidl and Kaufland. It started as an internal system because the company didn't fancy having its mountain of commercial and employee data sitting on foreign cloud providers, and then other organisations noticed they had exactly the same worry. STACKIT now sells itself as a sovereign European alternative to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, with data held inside the European Economic Area, and it's been included in a German public-sector cloud framework worth up to €250 million (Financial Times). I do enjoy the idea of the people who bring you the €1.15 tin of chickpeas squaring up to Amazon at cloud computing, and apparently meaning it.

And it's not just individual companies. The European Commission's 2026 open-source strategy explicitly names Europe's dependence on non-European software, cloud and AI providers as a sovereignty problem, and pushes procurement towards things public bodies can inspect, modify and walk away from without being held hostage by a single vendor (Interoperable Europe Portal). Germany is building openDesk, an open-source office and collaboration suite intended to free its federal administration from permanent mooring to Microsoft by 2028 (Digital Ministry). Meanwhile W Social has appeared as a European microblogging alternative to X and Threads. Despite some breathless reporting it isn't an EU project; it's a private European company running on the same AT Protocol as Bluesky, with European hosting and identity verification to keep the bots and the anonymous bile down (Xataka).

None of this will topple the American giants by next Tuesday, and that isn't the point. The point is that an ecosystem of alternatives is being deliberately cultivated in places where American dominance used to be treated like the weather: unpleasant sometimes, but not something you could do anything about.

Sovereignty with wings

The same calculation has reached defence, where the sums are rather larger than my Dropbox subscription.

In 2025 Spain shelved its plans to buy America's F-35, having committed the bulk of its extra defence spending to European industry, with the Eurofighter and the perpetually troubled FCAS programme as the alternatives (Reuters). Spain has separately approved buying up to 45 Turkish Hürjets, though these are advanced trainers replacing its geriatric American F-5s rather than front-line fighters, and the mooted talks over Turkey's Kaan stealth fighter are a long way from an order (El Español). The details are important, but so is the direction of travel. A fighter jet you can't maintain, upgrade or arm without the continuing goodwill of a foreign government isn't entirely yours; it's more of a long-term rental with a temperamental landlord.

Elsewhere, eleven NATO members including Germany, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden have picked Saab's GlobalEye for NATO's next airborne early-warning system, replacing part of the ageing fleet of American Boeing E-3s, and France has separately ordered two of its own (NATO). This is hardly a clean divorce: the GlobalEye sits on a Canadian Bombardier airframe and is stuffed with American components. But that's what real diversification looks like in practice. You don't build a fortress and pull up the drawbridge; you just stop leaving every key in the same pocket.

Starlink, Palantir and the fine print

The same pattern shows up in satellites and surveillance tech, although some of the headlines have galloped ahead of the facts.

The European Commission hasn't banned Starlink, whatever YouTube thumbnails may suggest. What it has proposed is reorganising the valuable 2 GHz satellite spectrum when the current licences expire in 2027: a third reserved for secure government services from an EU operator tied into the IRIS² satellite project, a chunk favouring European commercial services, and a portion left open to non-European operators (European Commission). Starlink can carry on operating in Europe. What it can no longer assume is unrestricted access to a strategic resource on terms drawn up as if European sovereignty didn't exist.

Palantir tells a similar story. There's been no single EU decision to expel it, but France's domestic intelligence agency is replacing it with the French firm ChapsVision, and the Netherlands' enormous ABP pension fund has dumped a Palantir stake previously valued at around €825 million (Financial Times). Separate decisions, different reasons, same underlying reluctance: nobody much fancies entrusting the continent's most sensitive data, policing and intelligence to politically connected American platforms any more.

Even stablecoins have been dragged into it. Germany and Italy have proposed an emergency brake letting European regulators restrict globally issued stablecoins that threaten financial stability, while the ECB points out that the market is overwhelmingly dollar-denominated and dominated by two non-European issuers, and gets on with building its own infrastructure for tokenised transactions settled in central-bank money (Euronews). Nobody in Brussels is using the word boycott. The word they use is control, which frightens American shareholders considerably more.

The same logic runs through the digital euro, which MEPs cleared for negotiation on 9 July by 416 votes to 169, pitched openly as a way of loosening Europe's dependence on American payment networks. Which is fine as far as it goes, and I say that as someone whose instinctive response to the phrase "central bank digital currency" is to work out where the exits are. I first saw it promoted on Instagram, presumably part of some campaign to smooth its arrival, and the comments were a wall of people worrying about the end of cash. I share the worry. Worth knowing, then, that Parliament's version pushes back in that direction: the offline digital euro would be a tokenised form of cash, paid device to device without settling on any ECB ledger, deliberately designed to behave like a banknote rather than a receipt, and it moves through the legislature bolted to a companion law protecting the legal tender status of notes and coins (European Parliament). The ECB has been stressing since the very beginning that cash is not under threat. Well, they would, wouldn't they. I've read the published documents going back years and the reassurance has never wavered, which is itself faintly suspicious. The trouble is that reassurances are a snapshot and infrastructure is a direction. Every step towards a digital currency makes cash a little more marginal, a little more of a nuisance for retailers to handle, a little easier to characterise as the awkward legacy option, until one day the position can be revised without anybody having to admit they've changed their mind. Nobody abolishes cash. It just quietly stops being accepted. That said, Visa and Mastercard have been hoovering up a record of every transaction you make for decades without offering anyone a vote on it, so the bar here is not high.

Meanwhile, at the Treasury

The consumer end of this is the visible bit: Europeans and Canadians skipping American brands, apps that suggest local alternatives, holidays in the US quietly rebooked, McDonald's and Levi's reportedly now treating anti-American sentiment as a commercial risk (eMarketer). But the institutional shift is the one that counts. A punter changing cloud providers costs an American company a few euros a month. A government swapping out its office software, or a military alliance choosing a different aircraft, redirects billions and builds industrial capacity that lasts decades.

And America's finances make that loss of confidence genuinely dangerous. The national debt is nudging $40 trillion, and net interest payments are on course to top a trillion dollars this fiscal year, roughly triple what they were in 2020. Washington now spends more servicing its debt than it spends on Medicaid or national defence, it's roughly level with Medicare, and the Congressional Budget Office reckons the bill doubles again to $2.1 trillion by 2036 (Peter G. Peterson Foundation).

Then at the end of July came a moment that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. To prop up the Japanese yen, which had slid to its weakest against the dollar in close to four decades, the US Treasury had the New York Fed sell euros out of America's own reserves to buy yen, the first joint operation of its kind with Tokyo since 1998, placed through Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (CNBC). We know roughly what Washington chipped in because a Reuters photographer caught Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's notepad at a Camp David cabinet meeting, helpfully reading "Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) $5-10 bil." Fortune rounded up expert reaction under the headline verdict that the move was "weird" and "unwise" (Fortune), the objection being that coordinated interventions have always been funded with dollar assets, and that dodging that convention rather advertises how badly Washington wants to avoid signalling anything about the dollar.

Then the interesting bit emerged. The FT reported, and Reuters stood up, that the European Central Bank was told about the sale of its currency only after the trade had already gone through; Lagarde and Bessent spoke the following day. Bessent's own account, given to CNBC, was that he had reassured European partners it amounted to "just a reallocation of our reserves", before going on to remark that the euro looked to be near its equilibrium price (Brussels Signal). Being informed after the event that your currency has been spent, and then being told by a foreign treasury secretary roughly what it ought to be worth, is a remarkable position for an institution that has spent the past year arguing the euro should become a serious rival to the dollar. Since the war, Western central banks have planned this sort of thing together in advance. This time nobody bothered.

Here's the delicious bit. A week before all that, the ECB had quietly finalised a facility letting, in principle, any non-euro central bank on Earth borrow up to €50 billion in euro liquidity against high-quality euro collateral, with drawings starting in the fourth quarter (ECB). That sounds dry, but it's precisely the plumbing that makes a currency function as a global reserve. The Fed built its version for the dollar decades ago; the ECB has just built one for the euro, in the same month America was raiding its euro piggy bank to firefight a crisis of its own making. Meanwhile euro-denominated bond issuance has hit its highest level since the currency launched, Google's parent Alphabet has started issuing bonds in euros, and the ECB's own research found the euro behaving like a safe haven during recent market panics (European Central Bank). That last job used to belong exclusively to the dollar.

A fortnight on, the intervention looks less like a rescue than a very expensive pause. The yen bounced from around 163 to the dollar to 155 and change, then gave back close to half of that within the week, ending it weaker than it started (Bloomberg). Nobody much expects it to hold: the gap between Japanese and American interest rates is what's driving the yen down, and no amount of buying fixes that. Nor is there much ammunition left. Washington has roughly €26 billion in readily deployable foreign currency across the Fed's open market account and the Treasury's stabilisation fund, which is not the sort of sum that moves a market trading several trillion dollars a day. These are not the actions of a country operating from strength. They look more like a man managing a margin call.

Now, honesty compels me to admit the awkward bit. I'm not an economist, and people have been predicting the death of the dollar for longer than I've had files rotting in Dropbox. The latest IMF figures show the dollar's share of global reserves actually rose to about 57 per cent in early 2026, while the euro's slipped to 20 (IMF). The dollar isn't falling off a cliff. But reserve currencies rarely do. They erode, slowly, as other countries build alternatives, settle more of their trade elsewhere, and grow less willing to finance the incumbent without asking questions. The alternative plumbing now exists. What happens next depends on how often America gives everyone a reason to use it, and on current form it seems determined to provide one weekly.

One small step

My files will make no measurable difference to any of this. Dropbox will survive my departure, and Amazon will cope if I move a couple of web services to Germany.

But commercial empires are built from millions of small assumptions: that the service will still be there, that the rules will stay recognisable, that the supplier's government will stay friendly, and that today's convenience won't become tomorrow's leverage. Trump has spent his time in office cheerfully demonstrating that none of those can be relied upon, and in doing so he's invited allies, governments and ordinary punters to imagine a world in which they need America rather less.

Moving my files was one microscopic vote for that world. One small step for man, as I said at the top. Empires have fallen over less. Well, no, they haven't, but give it time.