As for your american influence point, I'd certainly prefer if a strong EU council would block the sale instead of our transatlantic partners, but EU council can't even prevent OBOR in central europe...
Europe hasn't reached the same level of awareness(paranoia?) that the US has yet.
For example, when US was enthusiastic selling military equipment to China, not a single US company was ever denied a license, at the same time, US made everything to deny that for its allies.
SAP?
So, I don't know where your opinion comes from. But I think you could be better informed ;)
Ps. I do think we should buy less US and spend more European. Eg. The F-35 is a joke currently, considering the costs.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/fact-russia-pitch...
And whereas we by now have e.g. laws that allow transferring (say) a telephone number from one provider to the next; we do not yet have similar protections for the digital equivalents. Want to transfer your facebook account - as in the live account, connections & address & all, not the old data - to a new provider? Good luck with that (frankly, even the data isn't transferable, because the export format isn't an commonly used standard). Want to replace your gmail account with something else? Or, to play on recent events - want to transfer your .org registration to some place not being defrauded by ICANN insiders? All of that's hopeless.
People sometimes claim there are technical difficulties here, but while those are real - they're not the cause for all this lock in. If the alternative to account transferability were bankruptcy, you can bet the big players would have this solved in about next to no time at all; but as it is - the incentives are to suppress competition and leverage the ill-gotten gains from being an early moving and having access to a large, single-language market.
This is also why I'm not so sure china's rise is actually a bad thing - even for the US. The US economy is essentially stagnant; there needs to be a shake-up rather than resting on laurels. IP law currently is less of an incentive to create, and more theft of the commons - the benefits to the private interests are completely out of whack with the costs imposed on society. A country that won't entirely bow to the absurdities of IP law might inspire others for entirely selfish reasons to follow suit - and that might eventually cause the IP oligopoly to crack, and inject more actual dynamism and creativity. Make no mistake, I'm not suggesting china is being nice or anything - it's just that if we're lucky the collateral damage may fall for once in a beneficial direction. Of course, we might not be so lucky, but hey...
If Europe really wants to compete, it should take a look around and adopt a similar less protective stance. France's tax is the wrong direction - instead of taxing the giants, we should break their market power, and prioritize things like flexibility to reassign a facebook account over the trademark holders right to keep the facebook name in house. Copyright should be restrained to FRAND principles, and e.g. not be a way to prevent a competitor from competing (i.e. the oracle vs google api fight) - and perhaps changed fundamentally to discourage rent-seeking where the value of a copyright lies to a significant extent in the network effect, not the actual content (which is pretty often the case, e.g. for shared cultural history like music too).
The deck is fundamentally and anti-competitively stacked; there' little chance of fighting via innovation when there's no way to compete even with innovations.
Obviously, anti-competitive tendencies are just as strong in Europe or China as they are in the US. But given the self-interest in breaking the US IP-backed rent-seekers, and the coinciding (and politically acknowledged) threat of democracy-undermining social bubbles there's a chance for a least some baby-steps towards change.
But that's expensive and instead you guys get to shovel your money into social programs knowing if push comes to shove we are gonna help out.
The situation in Europe is entirely self-created.
But it's only a matter of time. ASML is tied to Wassenaar treaty at the end of the day. They're the perfect US pawns.
ASML rejects Samsung's involvement in IP theft case with rival, APRIL 17, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asml-holding-spying-samsu...
Samsung invested heavily in both companies XTAL and ASML (and owned at least 5% of the company at one point). Further, Samsung was never in semi-equipment/chemical business -- that's simply not their core competence.
ASML is a key component here: they build the machines needed to build the chip components of drones. In future wars, having microchip fabs will be as important as having steel mills was in WW2. So ASML has huge strategic importance.
Regarding China, it is building a monopoly in the hardware sector. It's already impossible to avoid China if you want to build a smartphone. The more this trend continues, the more China will exert influence with its power over that sector. For a military conflict with China, which isn't unlikely in the future, this means that anyone else would be at a disadvantage.
China, Rus, Persia, Arabia, etc dominated the mongols economically. The mongols conquered them all.
The roman empire economically dominated the germanic north. The barbarians sacked and eventually conquered rome.
It's nice to have an economic edge, but it's also important to maintain a military edge.
In the case of China, an import restriction amounts to an endorsement that replicating that technology is a higher priority for a country that, in general, is entering the first tier of technological powers. Picking fights with benefits that won't evaporate in a short time would be wise.
Only in nominal terms. Russia's economy is 50% larger in PPP terms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
We can argue about nominal vs PPP forever, but I think people should be aware of both.
> Denying a technology to Russia is effective because the relative price to Russia to work around technology restrictions is much higher.
Sanctions for countries like Russia and China are more of a nuisance than anything. It just means they have to pay a little bit more to buy/steal/access the technology.
For example, China had to pay extra to get israel to give them military tech denied to them by the US.
https://www.military.com/defensetech/2013/12/24/report-israe...
Countries like Russia and China have money, technology or political favors ( both are permanent security council members with veto power ) that they can trade with our enemies or our allies to gain access to tech.
Of course the US is unsanctionable. The US is the only country in the world where if another country placed sanctions on the US, it would hurt them and not the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...
