When Trust in America Broke for Global Traders

There is a conversation I keep coming back to, not because it changed my mind about anything, but because it forced me to say out loud something I had been quietly thinking for a while without quite finding the right words for it.

A few weeks ago I was on a call with one of my closest friends. He is American, I am Danish, and we have known each other for a long time now — proper years, the kind where you have been through deals that went sideways, celebrated the ones that worked out, and had enough dinners together that you know each other's kids by name. We are both fathers, both happily married, both completely and somewhat embarrassingly devoted to our daughters, and we share a lot of the same values when it comes to family, to politics, to business, and to the kind of world we want to live in. We grew up on the same music, we laughed at the same films, and we both still believe, genuinely and without any performance about it, in open markets and liberal democracy.

That part has not changed, and I want to be clear about that from the start, because everything I am about to say needs to sit against that backdrop. This is not a piece about Americans, and it is not a piece about American companies. It is about something colder and more structural than that.

The old deal

For most of my career, doing large deals with American companies felt like the safest bet available in international business, and I do not mean that as a throwaway compliment. It was not just that the products were good or that the people were sharp, though both were usually true. It was something beneath all of that — a kind of institutional gravity that you relied on without having to think too much about it. When you signed a significant contract with a US firm, you did so knowing that underneath the deal sat a set of structures that would hold it together regardless of who happened to be in the White House at any given moment: courts that worked, a Congress that complicated things in useful ways, regulatory agencies with their own institutional logic, and a two-party system that traded power back and forth but stayed within a corridor that everyone understood. You could trust the dollar as a reference point. You could trust that the process for resolving disputes was more or less what it said on the tin.

I have done a multitude of multimillion-dollar deals with American companies on exactly that basis, and some of the best people I know in business are American — people I would trust with my family without hesitation, and still would. The friendships are real and they are not going anywhere.

What I had not properly separated out until recently is that my trust in those people and my trust in the system around them were two completely different things, and I had been bundling them together for years without really examining the difference. It turns out that distinction matters enormously.

Two people, two risk assessments

My friend's view on the call was clear, and from where he sits it is entirely reasonable. He voted for Trump, not reluctantly or with any particular embarrassment about it, but because he looked at the alternative and concluded it was worse, and because a meaningful part of the agenda actually made sense to him. Controlling illegal immigration, forcing NATO members to actually fund their own defense, pushing back on trade relationships that had become genuinely one-sided, stopping the hollowing out of American industrial capacity — these are not crazy positions, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend otherwise.

Here is the thing: I agree with a lot of it. Europeans have been making the NATO funding argument ourselves for years, and anyone who looks at the immigration numbers in Western Europe with any honesty understands the political pressure that has built up. Had I actually been standing in a US voting booth last November, I would probably have made the same call he did, or at least I cannot say with any confidence that I would not have.

So this is genuinely not a story about a bad president or a misguided electorate, and I find it important to say that plainly. Half of what is happening in Washington right now reflects real frustrations with real problems, and my friend and I can work through all of that without any fundamental disagreement between us.

The issue sits in the other half — not even in the specific policies themselves, but in the method, the speed, the complete unpredictability of it, and most of all in what it has revealed about how much a single US administration can reach into global trade, into foreign data infrastructure, and into contracts that sit thousands of miles away, without the system doing much to slow it down in any timeframe that is useful to the people on the receiving end.

His underlying assumption, which is entirely fair from inside the country, is that the institutions are the real anchor and that individual presidents pass through the system without fundamentally changing it. Give it three years, let the correction happen, and things settle back into something recognizable.

What I said to him, and what I keep coming back to, is that for those of us on the outside, the correction is almost beside the point at this stage. We are not sitting here anxiously waiting to find out whether the system holds. We have already learned what it permits. And what it permits, any future president — of any party, with any personality — can use.

Tariffs: prices set in Washington, not in your contract

Tariffs are the most visible part of this, so let me start there.

In principle, tariffs are a legitimate instrument of trade policy and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. You can agree or disagree with any specific application of them, but the concept itself is not the problem. What we have lived through over the last couple of years is something different in character: tariffs deployed at short notice, in broad sweeps, justified under national security arguments that were difficult to take seriously in the context of, say, Danish or German steel exports, and calibrated in a way that often seemed to have much more to do with the domestic political moment than with any specific behavior by the exporters who ended up paying the price. [1][2][3]

And again, I say that not as a criticism of the political logic from the inside — it may well have been effective messaging for a domestic audience, and that is a legitimate thing for a government to pursue. But from the outside, it creates a specific and quite serious problem that does not go away just because the intentions were reasonable.

The problem is that there is no behavior you can change to reduce your exposure, because you are not actually the target. You are not being penalized for something you did, which means you cannot fix anything to make the risk go away. You are collateral in someone else's domestic story, and the decision that affects your margins, your supply chain commitments, and the economics of deals you signed in good faith is being made far away and for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of your work or the integrity of your counterpart.[1][2][3]

What that means in practice is that you can spend months negotiating a careful five-year supply arrangement with a trusted American partner, get everything right on both sides, and then wake up one morning to find that an overnight tariff announcement has made the deal unworkable — and your partner is just as blindsided as you are, and just as powerless to do anything about it. They did not choose this any more than you did. There is simply no table at which either of you is sitting when the decision gets made.

That combination of arbitrariness and complete loss of agency is, for a lot of European executives I know, the thing that has genuinely changed the calculation.

The off switch: cloud, data, and the reach of US law

Tariffs change the price of things, which is serious enough. But the next category affects something more fundamental — whether your operations can continue functioning at all.

Most European businesses today run a significant proportion of their critical infrastructure on US-origin technology: cloud platforms, productivity software, ERP systems, data analytics tools. That is not inherently a problem, and I want to be clear that most of these are excellent products made by companies I have a lot of respect for. The issue is not the quality of what they are selling.

The issue is that every US-headquartered technology company operates under US law, including laws that give US authorities considerable extraterritorial reach over data and services regardless of where the physical servers happen to be located. The US CLOUD Act, for instance, allows American authorities to compel US-based providers to produce data stored anywhere in the world, which means that a European company or government running sensitive operations on a US cloud platform has no reliable way, contractually or technically, to fully opt out of that exposure. The contract is with the vendor. The exposure is to Washington.[1][2]

This stopped being theoretical for a lot of people when the US sanctioned the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and Microsoft — following US law, as they were required to do — disabled her email and associated services. The ICC is not a marginal or controversial institution from a European perspective; it is a foundational part of the international legal architecture that we built together with the US after the Second World War. And yet a sanction decision taken in Washington rendered one of its senior officials unable to access her own inbox, and there was nothing anyone in Europe could do about it because the infrastructure it ran on was under American jurisdiction.[1]

Microsoft did not do anything wrong. That needs to be said clearly. They followed the law of the jurisdiction they operate in, which is exactly what you would expect from a well-run company. That is precisely what makes it so uncomfortable, because it means the risk is not about vendor behavior — it is structural.

Switzerland reached a similar conclusion more recently when it walked away from a potential Palantir contract for military intelligence use after assessing that US law could, under the right circumstances, compel Palantir to produce sensitive Swiss defense data to American authorities regardless of what any bilateral contract said. This was not about distrust of Palantir as a company — it was about the jurisdiction the company sits in and the obligations that come with it.[1]

What European boards are slowly and somewhat expensively coming to terms with is that the infrastructure decisions they made over the last fifteen years were not neutral commercial choices. They were jurisdictional bets. And US jurisdiction currently comes with an asterisk that was not prominently displayed when most of those contracts were signed.

American companies are not the villains here

I want to be direct about this, because it is the part of the conversation that tends to get lost.

US companies are in many cases the biggest losers from this situation, not the cause of it. American manufacturers and exporters were among the loudest critics of the broad tariff measures precisely because those measures hurt them too — pushing up their input costs, triggering retaliatory tariffs on their own exports, and in some cases damaging trading relationships that had taken years to build. US technology companies have spent enormous effort and real money trying to build credible sovereignty solutions for European customers and reassure regulators about data protection, only to find that their own government's legal framework undercuts those assurances in ways that are genuinely hard to design around.[1][2]

When a European company decides to diversify away from US cloud infrastructure, or declines to shortlist a US vendor for a critical contract, it is almost never because they have gone off Americans or because they think the product is bad. It is because their board has done a risk assessment and concluded that they cannot, in good conscience, leave that exposure unmanaged. That is a real commercial loss for American companies, and they did not create the situation that caused it.

How the response looks from here

None of what I have described is still in the planning stage. The adjustments are already happening, and at a scale that is starting to become visible.

European companies are building parallel capability with European cloud and software providers, restructuring contracts to include explicit tariff and sanctions provisions, insisting on operational architectures that sit outside US jurisdiction for their most sensitive functions, and actively exploring alternatives to US-headquartered platforms for core infrastructure. The conversation at board level has shifted noticeably in the last couple of years — US exposure is increasingly being treated as a category of sovereign risk rather than a straightforward commercial question, which means it gets mapped and managed differently from a standard vendor relationship.[1][2]

I want to be precise about what that means and what it does not mean. It does not mean European companies are trying to decouple from the US or that they are making decisions based on political sentiment. It means that executives who are responsible for long-term infrastructure and supply chain commitments have assessed a real, demonstrated risk and are pricing it in accordingly. That is not ideology. That is the job.

Why "just wait three years" does not work

I genuinely understand why my friend said it, and I am not dismissing the underlying logic — the US system has corrected from serious stresses before, and there is real historical evidence for institutional resilience.

But the problem with "give it three years" as a risk management strategy is that factories, IT architectures, and supply chains are not designed on three-year horizons. When you commit to a cloud platform, an ERP system, or a critical supplier relationship, you are making a decision whose effects run for ten to fifteen years, minimum. You are not going to rebuild your technology stack every time the political wind changes in Washington, and no board can be expected to operate that way.

More importantly, even if the next US president turns out to be calm, multilateralist, and deeply committed to the transatlantic relationship, all the tools that have been used so visibly over the last few years are still sitting there, fully intact, for any future occupant of the office to pick up. The tariff powers, the sanctions authorities, the extraterritorial reach of US data law — none of that gets repealed with a change of administration. And every future government, of any party, will have watched closely what those tools are capable of and how quickly they work.

The trust that has broken is not trust in American people, and it is not trust in American companies. It is the specific, structural trust that used to let us sign long-term contracts with US counterparts and feel confident that the political environment around those contracts would remain reasonably stable. We have now seen, in practice and in real time, that it does not have to. That is not something a new president simply switches off.

A note to the American friends I am thinking of as I write this

We are going to keep trading with you. The relationships are too deep, the commercial logic too strong, and honestly the friendships too important to walk away from any of it.

But we are also going to keep hedging, and I think it is worth being honest about that rather than dressing it up as something more complicated than it is. It is not about distrust of you as people or partners. It is about the fact that we have now seen, clearly and with real examples, that even a counterpart we trust completely and would vouch for without hesitation cannot, in the end, protect us from what their own government decides to do on any given morning.

If I could ask one thing, it would be this: please do not hear this as anti-Americanism, because it genuinely is not, and please resist the instinct to tell us to wait it out. Hear it instead as honest feedback from partners who still want the relationship to work well — which is exactly the kind of feedback you can only give to people you actually care about.

If the US wants to recover the position it held for decades as the world's default safe jurisdiction for trade and technology infrastructure, the answer is not a more reassuring president. It is something more durable than that — credible, structural limits on how easily any president can reach into the commercial relationships of allied countries. What that looks like in constitutional and political terms is, rightly, for Americans to work out.

Until then, we will keep trusting you. We will just also keep building our businesses as though your system could change its mind overnight — because we have now seen, without any ambiguity, that it can.

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