Eoin Drea is senior research officer at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies.
For all its trade threats and flips-flops on tariffs, Washington actually has a very consistent policy when it comes to U.S. tech companies — it wants to ensure their global dominance. And it’s got a “friend” in the EU to help with that.
For the White House, the bloc’s recently imposed fines on giants Meta and Apple are a “novel form of economic extortion,” which are designed to escalate transatlantic trade tensions and impose even more “non-trade tariffs” on U.S. companies.