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 weirdest thing and the most surreal thing about this is that Trump never won more than 50% of the vote. The closest he ever came was 49.8%. He just never won it. And what we have here is something called the Electoral College that actually chooses who the President is based on, loosely based on, what votes the President gets. It’s more complex than I care to explain here, but my point is, half the people in the country, well more than half. Never wanted him to be president, ever.
Of the half that did, or supposedly did, because I still don’t believe that last vote was fully legitimate. Even many of those, at this point, do not want him to be president, because of the way he’s destroyed U.S. soft power, and weakened the U.S. military by engaging in a meaningless war, that’s even illegal, and yet it still proceeds.
I wholly believe historians will see what he has done as an intentional dismantling of the country.
And yet, to your point, we like Europe, like more than half of us, by a lot, like Europe, and yet, short of engaging physically, we cannot do anything about him being in power. They’ve already shown that they don’t care about what kind of riots are happening, or what kind of civil unrest.
Definitely a good point about the popular vote, I noticed that in the past that he never got a majority of the popular vote.
And yes I think the Electoral College is too flawed. I’d like to see it abolished, personally. I don’t see why voters in less populated states should get more say than voters in more populated states.
Hopefully the US and Europe can be on good terms again in the future, but who knows. I guess it depends a lot on how the 2028 election turns out.
So very much damage has been done. I think it will be a long time until relations are restored to what they once were.