[dividedbyzero]

Today it's Ukraine and F35s, who and what will it be in a year? I suppose European governments are taking a long hard look at strategic dependencies on the US right now, like the whole economy running on top of Microsoft and Google and other US-made SaaS. If all of that went dark at once, I honestly don't know how some of the larger companies I know could keep operating. They all have fallbacks for critical infrastructure obviously but those are US-made, too...

[jopsen]

In practice it goes both ways...

Lots of critical things for the US is made exclusively in Europe.

Lots of medicin that people rely on daily would be unavailable if EU/US trade broke down completely.

[generic92034]

Adding to this:

About half of the US companies over a certain size run on ERP software from an European vendor. And it is not trivial at all to change that, even if they wanted to.

[perlgeek]

... and nearly all European corporations run US-made operating systems on some of their machines, many of which are critically important.

A real untangling of the US and European economies seem both impractical and really inefficient.

[Spivak]

I feel like this overstates the importance a bit. Sure macOS and Windows can claim to be involved in a great many things but no computer system running Windows is that important and couldn't be replaced given you have quite a large amount of lead time before the software is inoperable.

I've worked with airgapped Windows XP machines still in operation running scientific instruments.

If you deleted Microsoft and Apple from world it world it would be a Y2K event but the world wouldn't end, it would just be a lot of work.

[throwaway48476]

At this point it's inevitable, no matter the cost.

[touisteur]

Aside from life-saving medicine, I was thinking that the un-availability (not 'available with tariffs' but 'we're not selling it to the US anymore') of Ozempic in the US might become a political problem, maybe more so than many other trade-war hits. Maybe it's easy to manufacture it locally but the time-gap until it's up and running might be too much to swallow...

[agsqwe]

US has Eli Lilly with a competing product (Tirzepatide)

[tokai]

Not going to happen. It would kill Novo Nordisk, which would be extremely bad for the Danish economy.

[touisteur]

I think having Greenland annexed might also be a problem for the Danish. Europe might subsidize Novo Nordisk's losses, switch to distributing the meds all throughout Europe. And it seems the loss of such a society-transformative drug (and having millions of people gaining back all their lost weight would be a difficult/untenable political position for this administration. Just surprised not to see this much in the current news.

Sibling in thread says there's already an US alternative, anyway.

[thfuran]

I don't think that would end up being a political problem. It'd just get spun as the evil communist Europeans trying to destroy America with their traitor liberal collaborators and used as justification for passing the FAT IS FREEDOM Act, which subsidizes butter production and eliminates capital gains tax and the library of Congress.

[tim333]

I think so far F16s not F35s. Though you wonder if say the UK could use F35s in Ukraine without Trump trying to turn something off.