An election decides who holds the switch, not whether there is one.
Democrats won both chambers of Congress in last week's midterms, and within hours my feed had a word for it: the Bluenami. The relief was everywhere: the voters came to their senses, Congress will rein Trump in, and by 2028 at the latest things go back to how they were.
They won't. And I think that's good news.
An election decides who holds the switch, not whether there is one.
The president wasn't on the ballot. Nothing Europe depends on moved on election night. A 2018 US law, the CLOUD Act, still lets US authorities demand data from American providers even when it's stored abroad. Three US companies (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) still hold about 70 percent of Europe's cloud market, by Synergy Research's count in July 2025. Add the AI models and the chips underneath: no vote changes who owns them.
The power to flip the switch sits mostly with the president. In February 2025, a presidential order, with no vote in Congress, put sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. In May, the US news agency AP reported, citing court staff, that Microsoft had canceled his email address. Microsoft says it never cut off the court itself.
A Democratic president in 2029 won't hand it all back either. I expect parts of America First to outlast Trump: the last time a Democrat followed him, Joe Biden kept his tariffs on Chinese goods and in 2024 raised the one on Chinese electric cars to 100 percent.
Any dependency carries this risk, and not only in tech. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, by the German government's count, Russian gas made up more than half of Germany's gas market, until the flow stopped. When China restricted rare-earth magnet exports in April 2025, European car-parts makers had shut production lines by June, their industry association said.
Once a switch has been used, nobody can plan as if it won't be again. That's why the old world isn't coming back.
I don't miss it, though. For decades, change was what got priced as a risk. Every migration plan has a risk section: downtime, retraining, the budget running over. The contract you renew has none. Staying looked free. It isn't, and once staying carries a price tag and a risk line of its own, the choice becomes real.
Sovereignty done right is resilience: enough real options that no single party can switch anything off entirely. Swap a US vendor for a European or Chinese one you still can't leave, and you've only changed the flag on the switch.
When the same court wanted out of Microsoft, a way out was ready: in October 2025 it chose openDesk, an open-source office suite Germany built for its own public administration.
So before you file the midterms under "crisis over", check the next renewal on your desk: where is its risk section?
