Description
Late 2025 saw Donald Trump pose an ultimatum to the EU and its Member States, which Trump viewed as a liberal project, out to destroy the US. The EU had a choice, he said, between Chinese tech or US tech. If the EU continued to allow ‘undemocratic Chinese tech’, thereby ‘supporting the communists’, Trump would cut off the EU’s access to AI products from the US. Moreover, the EU would have to let go of most of its ethical AI regulations, as well as significantly reduce Chinese imports. With a digital knife at its throat and its back against a wall of technological overreliance, the EU felt it had no choice but to comply…
As American AI systems crept into European society, taking over jobs, Big Tech became Bigger Tech. It seemed so convenient at first, at least for the lucky ones: they could work less and spend more time with their kids or enjoying iced matchas in the sun. As the EU and EU Member States gave up on their short-lived ambition for (digital) strategic autonomy, the EU’s digital deficit, like that of Canada, Japan and others, became an economy-wide trade deficit, while European capital in Silicon Valley skyrocketed. Mass layoffs of white-collar workers resulted in the complete rupture of social cohesion. Some politicians proposed special taxes for AI and social media products to offset the massive outflow of capital, but Trump blocked any attempts to that end, threatening to retract the US from NATO. NATO chief Mark Rutte assured President Trump that all would be okay, stating that NATO countries would soon spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence and another 3.5 per cent on dual-use AI.
Now, in 2029, it has become clear – even to critics of the EU’s large-scale adoption of American AI – that countries aligning with China were in an even more precarious position, at least for the moment. On 4 July 2029, ChatGPT 15o5 was released, focused on upgrading Tesla’s humanoid robots to automate childcare in Western countries. As the demand for electricity in Europe surged with this upgrade, power gids started to fail, resulting in a national power outage in the Netherlands and several other European countries.
That same day, however, Russia’s growing dependency on Chinese technology began to backfire. Beijing announced that it was unhappy with Moscow’s floundering economy, and quietly imposed new conditions on continued access to its AI and robotics systems. Huawei and other Chinese tech giants rolled out software ‘security updates’ that effectively gave Beijing full operational oversight of Russia’s automated industries and digital infrastructure.
When several regions resisted, important parts of their power grids and logistics networks were suddenly paralysed. Critical robots in logistics hubs and energy plants stopped responding to Russian commands, waiting instead for remote instructions from Beijing. With production halted and public order fraying, local authorities were forced to comply with Chinese directives, effectively turning Russia’s economy into a controlled dependency. What had begun as a partnership of convenience had evolved into a digital vassalage.
It was day three of the power outage as Sytse, a millennial and proud early-adopter of new technologies and gadgets, let out a sigh of relief. With the shutdown of AI came a temporary relief from the ‘AI colonialism’ to which the Netherlands had been subjugated. True, it was painfully difficult for Sytse to relearn to plan routes, form opinions, make choices – in short, to live in an offline world. Still, as barter and trust replaced payments through plastic and bytes, Sytse felt in control and more human than he had in a long time.
The power outage brought some time to reflect truly, free from intrusive AI advice. Would a choice for European AI have been better? Could the EU have opted to advance without access to cutting-edge AI models? What would have been the hard and soft power implications of such choices? Given the lively barter economy that Sytse was now witnessing, perhaps the data centres could remain off a little longer, once the lights turned back on?
Scenario Analysis 3: National Security Implications for the Netherlands in the EU Context
In this Plausible Tomorrow, the global AI race has hardened into a binary contest between the United States and China. Open-source models are widely available but significantly inferior in capability to the closed, proprietary models from the US and China. The rest of the world becomes secondary terrain, where sovereignty is traded for access to AI systems. The EU and its Member States no longer have control over their own digital society and economy – effectively turning them into digital colonies. The dream of strategic autonomy, societal resilience and economic security has collapsed.
The two superpowers now fully dominate the AI supply chain, from infrastructure (including data centres, cloud services and AI chips) to algorithms and applications. The preferences of American and Chinese tech giants increasingly shape domestic political decisions as well as diplomatic policies and actions. The world is geopolitically split in two. Countries either work for and obey America or China. In the absence of European-built AI propositions, the continent is vulnerable to exploitation and engineered instability: after all, it depends on systems designed elsewhere to control critical infrastructure and public functions.
Without urgent investment in AI infrastructure, education and manufacturing, the EU essentially becomes a vassal in a techno-feudal system defined by others.[20] The military implications are stark: EU and Member States’ capabilities depend on second-tier technologies, leaving the continent in a dangerous position. Autonomous weapons, drone swarms and agentic AI-powered surveillance define modern warfare – but Europe lacks control of foundational systems. As US and Chinese companies race towards militarised AI, the EU can only respond with moral appeals in public, while begging for access to imports behind closed doors.
European states find themselves politically powerless. Media moderation, labelling and narrative construction are outsourced to AI systems that are tuned in either Beijing or Washington. As truth becomes centralised in the hands of a few private or authoritarian truth arbiters, the EU’s capacity to maintain legitimacy in the digital public sphere is severely weakened.
In this dependency scenario, truth decay takes a new dimension: people are increasingly shaped by dependencies on foreign systems – with no meaningful regulatory oversight to control this. The Netherlands risks ceding not only digital sovereignty but also narrative sovereignty: citizens internalise framings of security, identity and norms that reflect outside interests rather than domestic democratic debate. Human oversight becomes decorative – a token presence amid sweeping automation.
Economically, Europe slips further behind. The continent faces capital flight, loss of tech-industry relevance and shrinking innovation ecosystems. Skilled labour moves abroad. Even ASML, once Europe’s ace card, is buckling under foreign pressure. In the age of AI gods, there is little room for minions: the Netherlands is about to watch its most strategic company depart, leaving the country – and the continent – truly empty-handed. Lacking access to the latest AI innovations, European companies and countries face an increasingly uphill struggle. States may be forced to barter natural resources or regulatory compliance just to access critical systems.
Dependence on foreign AI systems also erodes protections for Dutch citizens’ physical safety: with safety-critical updates controlled from abroad, the ability to safeguard life and wellbeing within the Netherlands diminishes. Finally, the effective outsourcing of governance to US and Chinese technology giants undermines the Netherlands’ commitment to the rule of law, as compliance with treaties and human rights standards becomes subject to external political and corporate interests.
This Plausible Tomorrow underscores that tipping points matter: by the time Europe recognises its loss of relevance, the moment for effective action has already passed, leaving the bloc paralysed and dependent.