Vladimir Putin appears to have concluded that he cannot win the war in Ukraine on the battlefield. His strategy now is to grind Ukraine down. How scandalous that Donald Trump has become his best weapon economist.com/leaders/2026/1…

5/5 Now, I love America. I'm writing this because I want ordinary Americans to understand the consequences of these disastrous decisions. The damage being done to America's reputation won't be reversed by the results of the next elections. It will take decades to rebuild that trust. And the economic consequences, while not immediate, will go much further than a potential 2 cents per gallon decrease in diesel prices. And if you think the world doesn't notice, or that everything I'm describing is just hypothetical, let me give you two examples of what is already happening. These decisions were made even before the latest Starshield restrictions, which only make the problem much worse. Airbus, one of the world's largest aircraft manufacturers, has already signed a contract to move 70 critical applications from Amazon AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway, with plans that could eventually include 900 applications. Airbus specifically mentioned concerns about foreign laws and potential "kill switches" when choosing its new provider. In the Netherlands, one of the country's largest telecom companies, KPN, partnered with German Schwarz Digits to build European cloud infrastructure using STACKIT, hosted in Dutch data centers and controlled by European companies. The Dutch government has also approved STACKIT as an alternative cloud provider for its agencies. These aren't some people complaining about Trump on Twitter. These are major corporations signing real contracts, investing real money and building infrastructure to reduce their dependence on American technology. And that's the part Americans need to understand. For decades the USA was a reliable partner. Republicans and Democrats disagreed about plenty of things, but America's foreign policy was built around long-term strategic interests and institutions that survived changes in presidents. Countries trusted the USA enough to build entire industries around its technology. Now a foreign government has to consider whether some American president might wake up tomorrow wanting cheaper gas, believing another promise from Putin, getting angry with its elected leadership, or trying to get a better deal for his friends. And suddenly technology that was supposed to make that country more productive becomes a potential political weapon against it. The USA spent decades making the world dependent on its technology because the world trusted America. Now American companies will be paying the price for political decisions they didn't make, long after the politicians responsible are gone. And no election in the USA will magically restore that trust.