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This is not easily done. The withdrawal will be extreme and take a great deal of time. I think most will not have the will once they steel the cost. I know th

This is not easily done. The withdrawal will be extreme and take a great deal of time. I think most will not have the will once they steel the cost. I know this forum loves to prognosticate but the right thing is what one must do to survive.

blibble 2y ago
> I think most will not have the will once they steel the cost. if you're a government it's quite easy to "encourage" it to occur example: "US cloud provider revenue levy", starting at 0%, increasing 1% each month until 40% the aim being to add a large risk premium to all purchases of US cloud services, encouraging companies to switch to domestic suppliers the EU is already publicly talking about retaliating in this manner
ikiris 2y ago
This is why a tariff trade war is extremely dangerous right now. It explicitly incentivizes this further as an intentional goal.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I agree with your first paragraph, not so much the second. I think the rest of the world is just dealing with the reality that the US is now an unreliable partner and cannot be trusted. In the face of that, yes, I agree that most of them won't dump the US immediately with big fanfare, but they will start to decouple in the background where it matters - making trade deals that exclude the US, building real incentives for the intelligentsia to stay away from the US (though the US is already doing a fairly decent job of that themselves), taking more responsibility for their own defense, etc. I mean, look what happened to Vietnam and Israel. They capitulated in the face of the tariff threat and removed their tariffs on US imports, and they still got hit with some of the highest (or, it Vietnam's case, the highest) tariff rates. Europe has already realized (and this is a good thing and a long time coming IMO) that they need to rebuild their defense capacity because they can't depend on the US. So no, I don't believe it will happen immediately, but I also believe that over the longer term (5-10-15 years) that decoupling from the US is inevitable solely because not doing that will be more difficult for other countries.

blibble 2y ago

> I think most will not have the will once they steel the cost. if you're a government it's quite easy to "encourage" it to occur example: "US cloud provider revenue levy", starting at 0%, increasing 1% each month until 40% the aim being to add a large risk premium to all purchases of US cloud services, encouraging companies to switch to domestic suppliers the EU is already publicly talking about retaliating in this manner

ikiris 2y ago

This is why a tariff trade war is extremely dangerous right now. It explicitly incentivizes this further as an intentional goal.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I agree with your first paragraph, not so much the second. I think the rest of the world is just dealing with the reality that the US is now an unreliable partner and cannot be trusted. In the face of that, yes, I agree that most of them won't dump the US immediately with big fanfare, but they will start to decouple in the background where it matters - making trade deals that exclude the US, building real incentives for the intelligentsia to stay away from the US (though the US is already doing a fairly decent job of that themselves), taking more responsibility for their own defense, etc. I mean, look what happened to Vietnam and Israel. They capitulated in the face of the tariff threat and removed their tariffs on US imports, and they still got hit with some of the highest (or, it Vietnam's case, the highest) tariff rates. Europe has already realized (and this is a good thing and a long time coming IMO) that they need to rebuild their defense capacity because they can't depend on the US. So no, I don't believe it will happen immediately, but I also believe that over the longer term (5-10-15 years) that decoupling from the US is inevitable solely because not doing that will be more difficult for other countries.