I know it's incredibly long read. But as someone involved in a tech sector specifically working with the products that will suffer from this, I want you to please read my article below

1\5 America went much further than that with its recent Starshield/Starlink restrictions on Ukraine. Let me explain the effects. Starlink is a technology that provides critical communication service to government and civilian sector, I repeat the service is critical. So what happened, and why it matters? Someone wanted a 2 cent lower diesel prices before the midterms, or was promised something by putin in exchange for this, maybe he just had a bad mood. Many say Ukraine is not an ally, so the USA can just do whatever it wants, however the service that was crippled by American political leadership or at their silent approval is sold to Germany and Poland, which are part of NATO and are in critical interests of these countries to keep Ukrainian operations running, you may argue, but it's official position by the elected political leadership of these states. Many say it's a blow to the starlink, others that it's a blow to American military industries. I think it's much wider, it's a significant in blow to the American tech and industrial sector which has been driving Americans economy for the past decades. I am a cloud infrastructure engineer developing on premise, hybrid and sovereign solutions. This cloud infrastructure hosts data services used in production facilities, telecom, AI, mining industries and energy sector. Essentially all critical services to a functioning state. Right now everything is run via remote control planes. Here are more concrete 3 example in the thread below:

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.

4/5 Now let's move to another example. And this one is based on real political events, not some random scenario. Remember what happened in Romania in 2025, when the Trump administration attacked the country's decision to cancel its presidential election? Or Germany, where the American vice president publicly defended AfD and met its leader just days before the elections? Now imagine a European country running its election infrastructure on American technology. Let's say it's a Google Cloud database used for processing and reporting election results. What would stop a future US vice president from calling Google's leadership and pressuring them to push an update that would cripple the system in the middle of an election? Suddenly counting becomes extremely slow, databases start failing, results are delayed or become inconsistent. And then the same American administration starts publicly attacking that country for slow vote counting, accusing it of rigging the elections, and spreading distrust toward its democratic institutions. They wouldn't even need to change the election results. Simply making the system unreliable at the most critical moment could be enough to make millions of people question whether the election was legitimate. And if you think Google is some completely independent corporation that cannot be pressured by an American president, let me remind you of something. Google already agreed to direct $22 million toward Trump's White House ballroom as part of the settlement of his lawsuit against YouTube. A ballroom that has absolutely nothing to do with Google's business. Unless someone is naive enough to believe Google genuinely wanted to finance Trump's ballroom. And if so, I don't think you understand the ripple effect that this kind of political pressure sends across the world. I'm not saying Google has interfered with any country's elections. I'm explaining how dangerous the dependence becomes when a foreign government has both the political motivation and potential leverage over the companies providing critical infrastructure. And this isn't only about Trump. It's about every future American president who will inherit the same tools and see the precedent being established today.

3/5 Now let's take Audi in Germany as another example. Audi is already using American Broadcom's VMware technology to run virtual PLCs that control actual manufacturing robots in its German factories. For people who aren't engineers, PLCs are essentially computers that control industrial machinery, robots, conveyors and other factory equipment. Traditionally these were separate physical controllers. Now Audi is running some of them as virtual machines on servers, using American virtualization technology. And as an engineer working in cloud infrastructure, I can tell you that nobody needs some hidden kill switch to interfere with these systems. Virtualization platforms already have mechanisms to limit CPU time, throttle disk I/O and control network bandwidth. Unlike regular applications, industrial controllers depend on very precise timing. Start messing with that timing and machines can start failing or stopping for safety reasons. Or the American software supplier could simply refuse to provide critical software updates, license renewals or technical support. I'm not saying Broadcom has remote administrative access to Audi's factories today. We don't know that. But Germany is already putting actual factory controllers on top of software developed and maintained by an American company. And after seeing what happened with Ukraine's Starshield communications, why shouldn't German manufacturers ask themselves what happens if some future US president decides Germany needs to be punished over a trade disagreement? We're talking about factories and equipment worth billions of dollars. Not some Netflix subscription that you can simply cancel and replace tomorrow. And this is exactly why the reliability of American foreign policy matters so much more than most Americans realize.

2/5 Canadian oil sands operations already depend on American Caterpillar technology to operate fleets of enormous mining trucks. For example, Imperial Oil's Kearl mine in Alberta operates 81 autonomous Caterpillar 797F trucks. These trucks drive themselves, but their operations are managed through central control systems. Caterpillar's mining software already supports cloud telemetry, remote monitoring, software updates and even changes to machine control parameters. As an engineer working in cloud infrastructure, I can tell you that implementing something like a limp mode in a system already designed for centralized management isn't some science fiction. We don't know whether Caterpillar has such a capability deployed in Canadian mines today. We also don't know what mood the next US president will wake up in tomorrow when it comes to Canada. And after what happened with Starshield in Ukraine, the question isn't so ridiculous anymore. Are we now just one political decision away from having critical industrial systems crippled because some American president wants to score a few miserable points in domestic politics, please his dictator friend in Russia, or secure a better deal for a company owned by his friends or family? And that's exactly the problem. Countries are building entire industries around technology developed and maintained by American companies, only to discover that their ability to operate equipment they already paid hundreds of millions of dollars for could one day depend on the personal interests of whoever occupies the White House. And nobody needs some secret kill switch to make that happen. Losing access to critical software updates, support or management infrastructure could be enough. I'm not claiming Caterpillar has such remote access to these specific trucks today. The problem is how much critical infrastructure countries are placing under foreign technological dependence.