Washington's bullying of Europe hypocritical

The US State Department's latest proposals reported by the Financial Times on Sunday to finance "free speech" initiatives across Europe with tens of millions of dollars reveal a contradiction that extends far beyond ideology: Washington spending public money to influence political debates in Europe while insisting that foreign governments must never do the same in the United States.

If Brussels were to establish a multimillion-euro program supporting organizations campaigning against Republican or Democratic policies inside the US, the reaction on Capitol Hill would be immediate and furious. The same principle somehow becomes more flexible when the direction of influence runs across the Atlantic.

Behind the lofty language lies the true objective: protecting US economic interests by weakening European regulation from within. The ostensible target of this largesse is the European Union's Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act — regulations that were debated, amended and passed through the full legal machinery of the European Parliament and member states. They are laws designed to protect European users from disinformation, hate speech and the monopolistic abuse of a handful of tech giants, particularly those from the US that dominate the EU market.

Yet Washington has decided that these EU enactments constitute "censorship" and must be resisted from within. Reducing years of painstaking European legislation to mere "censorship" requires an extraordinary act of political simplification.

The proposed $2 million grant to "counter censorship" stemming from EU rules, the $5 million for a "civilizational alliance" in Europe, the $5 million earmarked for Free Speech Union International, the $7 million floated for think tank 878 — this is not a serious program of civic engagement. It is part of broader efforts to bankroll political factions that will do the US' bidding.

And what is that bidding? The DSA allows for fines of up to 6 percent of global turnover. The DMA targets six "gatekeeper" companies — mostly from the US. Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have faced billions of euros in penalties. The US response is not to compete, not to innovate, not to adapt and improve. It is to send US taxpayer money to European lobbying groups and organizations, if not activists, who will do the work of questioning Europe's laws. It is difficult to ignore that the regulations attracting Washington's greatest concern happen to be those imposing the highest costs on the US' biggest corporate champions.

The timing is hardly accidental. As Brussels moves to complete ratification of last July's transatlantic trade agreement — brokered by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and widely criticized across Europe as being tilted in Washington's favor — the funding proposal serves as a pointed reminder that the digital rule book remains unfinished business. Rather than accepting the DSA and DMA as settled European law, Washington appears determined to keep them at the heart of future transatlantic bargaining, using the language of "free speech" to reopen what Brussels considers a closed legislative chapter.

The US administration also wants to mobilize internal European opposition to the very regulations that the US tech lobby finds so inconvenient. Such tactics carry risks extending well beyond trade. Supporting organizations identified with Europe's conservative and anti-establishment movements inevitably export the US' own cultural conflicts into societies with very different political traditions. Europe's postwar prosperity has largely been based on consensus-building and institutional compromise rather than perpetual ideological mobilization. Injecting US-style polarization politics into that environment serves neither European stability nor transatlantic unity.

Mainstream parties from center-left to center-right in Europe should be alarmed. They are being told, in effect, that their "democratic legitimacy" is secondary to Washington's commercial interests.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this episode has been the muted response from much of Europe's senior leadership. Brussels has consistently defended its regulatory autonomy whenever challenged, yet its reaction to this unusually explicit US attempt at political influence has been notably restrained. Strategic silence risks conveying the message that such interference falls within acceptable diplomatic practice.

The attack is part of a systematic US assault on the very idea that Europe has the right to govern itself. US Vice-President JD Vance laid bare that message in his speech at the Munich Security Conference last year. He lectured European leaders that the continent's principal danger came not from external threats but from ones that he claimed came from within — the erosion of democratic norms, particularly censorship, the suppression of dissent and the exclusion of populist voices from public discourse.

If "freedom of expression" becomes just another geopolitical instrument wielded in pursuit of commercial advantage, both sides of the Atlantic will discover that trust is far harder to rebuild than regulations are to rewrite. Yet the more the US tries to bend Europe to its will through coercion and interference, the more it may inadvertently accelerate the very trend it tries to avoid: European strategic autonomy. That would be the ultimate irony of this ill-conceived venture.