When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in early 2025, the consequences were far-reaching yet quickly enforced.
The restrictions cut off the ICC chief prosecutor’s access to Microsoft services, including email, followed by a freezing of his personal and institutional bank accounts in affected jurisdictions.
While this was happening, the Dutch government was watching, coming to the bitter realization that access to essential services depended on decisions made in the U.S.
Hence, their response to this is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government in English.
It is a framework that looks to tackle the government’s digital stack, covering the OS, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services, IT management tools, and AI, with all of it being built around a NixOS foundation.
The US really pissed away any strategic advantage it may have had with that little stunt sanctioning a few justices and prosecutors.
It made it plainly obvious to anyone paying attention that American software cannot be trusted, and caused a bunch of countries to start preparing their exit strategy for building down their dependence on American software.
And for what?.. So that they could be an annoyance to some people prosecuting the war criminal, and friend of the US government, Benjamin Netanyahu? That sounds like such a small win, if it causes you to lose the leverage completely.
Edit: Not that I mind. It’s a good thing that it’s this plainly obvious that we cannot trust a reliance on anything American.
It makes it cost a whole lot less political capital in order to get governments to move away from these dependencies.
Trump single handedly removed like 30% of US soft power. Iran deal? Fucked.UN where they have permanent veto? Fucked. USAID? Fucked. American image abroad? Fucked. Ukraine assistance because of Europe allies? Fucked. American tech hegemony? Fucked. American military export to Europe? Fucked. Interceptor missiles stockpile reserve where you want to be on the good side to buy? Fucked (just gone). American energy transition for cheaper exports? Fucked. US Canada relations? Fucked. Trustworthyness? Fucked.
There might be some other stuff I don’t remember from the top of my head but this together makes staying on US good side just not that appealing because the benefits are largely gone.
30% ? You’re optimistic. I’d say it’s way more than that.
It’s very hard to estimate the number. US still has the US Dollar, AI, most tech companies and entertainment industry as well as a lot of what I listed above still even though it’s been reduced. Texas is becoming a green energy hub and California is still continuing the transition
Trump is working hard on the USD though by attacking the reserve and running an insane deficit and you can see treasury yields climbing. I would estimate that the USD dollar and military exports are more than 20% each. The leverage that US has on countries just by deciding who to sell and not to sell army stuff to is massive. Also having the global reserve currency and being able to largely cut countries off from foreign currency and banking is huge as well.
You’ve described almost everything Mr Trump has done, thus far, in his attempts to divert from Epstein and child molestation.
There’s got to be some guy in the Netherlands who’s spent a chunk of his career watching telemetry head back over the wire to MS. I’ll bet he’s laughing his ass off.
I cannot imagine the joy being told to solve a computer problem, and oh by the way you’re not allowed to use anything Microsoft.
Nobody should have trusted us anyway.
Microsoft is a disease. My biggest problem with them is that they make every single product with the sole intention of putting it behind a pay-per-use meter while misleading people into believing that their up-front costs cover all usage
They nickel and dime you to death, say that its free and then start charging you later on.
Trying to look cleanly across the costs is impossible. They will give you isolated dashboards for individual services, but never anything usefully comprehensive. They will gaslight you into believing that you just don’t know how to use their monitoring tools and you should know better. It should be easy, but it isn’t.
They are just a giant leech on all companies that use their shit. They only sell to exec leadership because none of those old farts understand how any of this stuff works. They don’t talk to tech people because they will ask three good questions and see the bullshit. If their products were any good, they wouldn’t need to sell this way. They’re not good. Azure is a clusterfuck. Entra is shit. Defender is incompetent. Sentinel is worthless and horribly expensive. Desktop os is a joke.
They can just make Microsoft office, that’s all they were ever good at. The rest is overpriced slop.
You don’t understand the fascist perspective. They think international cooperation and consensus is not a strategic advantage BUT a hindrance. They only think hard power is the only power.
But paradoxically, truth be told, there has never been an international order or law to follow. Joe Biden himself affirmed that US will invade the International Criminal Court if an American citizen is arrested. Trump and co. simply took the mask off.
The damage done by this president is literally irrepairable.
We can only hope…
Some innocent people live there.
As one of those people that live in the US, I think our superpower status has really enabled our harm, I dont really want us to keep it…
Sometimes people get really carried away with hating the US and it spills over into hating everyone here and wanting us to suffer, but I kinda DO hope the damage is irrepairable.
I don’t think its good for a country to have as much power as the US has had. And we have weilded that power to harm basically everyone else for our own gain. I’d really like that to never happen again, frankly, and for so long as we can, I expect we will
Power corrupts, and we have spent too long holding WAY too much of it. (Plus foundational issues with the US, those do exist too, they just aren’t what I’m talking about now)
There is innocent people in my country too. That doesn’t mean we are somehow owed the same privileged position that the US has held for decades.
Most certainly. It still doesn’t mean that every European country should be 100% attached by the balls to their predatory tech system.
Until I see more of those innocent people standing up and risking life and liberty to drag the orange one kicking and screaming from behind his desk to the noose…
They are not innocent. Sorry not sorry. Time for pleasantries and looking the other way is over.
sure, similarly in Russia and Israel but that’s not really the point.
Not many
The one potential upside to all of this is that countries now have a lot less need to adhere to the US mandated copyright protections established in the DCMA. Cory Doctorow has written much about this, and how the US used threats of trade sanctions to ensure other countries fell into line. Now that the US has deployed those sanctions against many countries and shredded any remaining trust and good will, countries have less motivation to adhere to those agreements and could abandon them. Doing so would potentially make it legal to push back against increasingly unhinged copyright protections, and allow citizens to do amazing things like fix your phone without risking a felony conviction. Doctorow says it all much better, he’s well worth reading on this and many other subjects.
By acting like sovereign nations themselves they are teaching other nations that they need self sovereign tech, and once governments start building it, it is there for other users.
Good, good.
Australia is alas too stupid to have learned this lesson.
Canada, checking in. We’re also in the shallow end of the pool.
Canada is learning its lesson. It’s just so entangled with the US that it’s taking a while to implement alternatives. Alberta is deliberately clinging onto the US as well.