The Enshittification of American Hegemony
For generations, U.S. allies operated comfortably under the protective umbrella of American global dominance, building their core national systems—from finance to communications to national defense—atop the public infrastructure the United States built and maintained for the post-WW2 world order. Today, that decades-old choice is looking like an irreversible catastrophic trap.
Back in 2022, writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe the vicious, repeating cycle that has come to define big tech platforms. First, founders lure early adopters with user-centric, high-quality services to win market share and build trust. Once users, vendors, and advertisers are locked in—trapped by network effects, prohibitive switching costs, and collective action problems that make coordinated exit nearly impossible—the playbook changes. Platform owners start squeezing every cent of profit out of their user base, flooding the service with low-quality junk to pad margins, then turn the screw on vendors and advertisers too. What started as a useful public tool becomes a coercive monopoly that serves only its owner.
Rarely do people frame U.S. military hardware, the global dollar system, and commercial satellite constellations as platforms. But that is exactly what they are. When U.S. allies purchase advanced warplanes like the F-35 stealth fighter, they aren’t just buying an aircraft—they’re tying their entire air operations network to U.S.-controlled infrastructure for communications, parts supply, maintenance, and ongoing technological support. When companies conduct cross-border trade and finance, nearly all transactions flow through the dollar clearing system, a global platform run by a small handful of U.S.-regulated financial institutions. When countries need to extend internet connectivity to hard-to-reach remote regions, most turn to Starlink, a satellite network operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a company with deeply embedded ties to the U.S. national security state. Just like Facebook or Amazon, American global hegemony runs on network logic: once you integrate your systems into the platform, leaving is so slow and costly that most never even attempt it.
For decades, allies accepted U.S. control of these global systems because they believed America would uphold a shared, rules-based international order. That belief has collapsed entirely in the wake of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. We now live in a world where Trump openly threatens to annex Canada, claims he will seize Greenland from Denmark, and punishes foreign leaders who push for independent content moderation rules for big tech.
Since his second inauguration in January, rapid enshittification has become the central organizing principle of U.S. statecraft. Trump’s inner circle now understands that controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security gives them almost unlimited coercive power over the rest of the world. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently put it: “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.”
For allies trapped in this system, the path forward is deeply daunting. Just like ordinary users stuck with a deteriorating Google Search or Facebook feed, many are only just realizing how difficult exiting the U.S.-led network really is. At the same time, a growing cohort of leaders are scrambling to build alternative, independent networks of their own—much like the dozens of forgotten startups that tried (and mostly failed) to build alternatives to Twitter and Meta over the past decade.
Infrastructure tends to stay invisible until it is weaponized against you. Back in 2020, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Hong Kong’s then-chief executive Carrie Lam over her crackdown on pro-democracy protests. Almost overnight, Lam learned the raw power of the dollar clearing system, a hidden layer of global finance most people have never even heard of.
Here’s how it works: Global banks rely on dollar conversions to facilitate smooth cross-border trade. A Japanese semiconductor firm selling chips to a Mexican tech company will almost always settle the transaction in dollars, the world’s de facto universal reserve currency that can be used immediately with any other trading partner. Whether the deal is denominated directly in dollars or converted through local currencies, the money ultimately flows through U.S.-regulated banks like Citibank and J.P. Morgan, which clear the transaction.
Dollar clearing is a convenient system for global commerce, but it is also the U.S.’s primary tool for enforcing its financial policy across the world. Any foreign bank that refuses to implement U.S. sanctions risks losing access to dollar clearing entirely—a threat that can put even large, well-established banks out of business. When Lam was sanctioned, even Chinese state-owned banks refused to do business with her, forcing her to store stacks of cash around her residence just to pay everyday bills.
That action against Lam was framed as a stand for democratic values, but in his second term, Trump has wasted no time weaponizing the dollar system against any target that irritates him. In February, for example, his administration sanctioned the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court after the ICC indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on alleged war crimes. Just like Lam, the prosecutor has become a global financial and political pariah: his UK bank has frozen his accounts, and Microsoft has shut down his professional email address.
Weapons systems are another core U.S. platform that Trump is now weaponizing. For decades, dozens of U.S. allies built their entire air power strategy around the F-35 stealth fighter, built by U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin. Earlier this year, rumors circulated online that the F-35 comes with a literal “kill switch” that allows the U.S. to disable the jets at will. While U.S. defense sources confirm there is no explicit off switch, the underlying fear is entirely justified.
As one former U.S. defense official explained, the entire “kill chain” for the F-35 is essentially controlled by the United States. Advanced warplanes need constant software updates, maintenance parts, and access to proprietary real-time intelligence streams for targeting and navigation. All of that critical support flows through U.S. systems, and can be cut off at any time. The precedent already exists: when the UK approved Ukraine’s use of British long-range missiles against Russia late last year, the UK reportedly had to get explicit U.S. approval for the targeting data the missiles rely on to hit their targets. After Trump’s chaotic Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the U.S. temporarily cut off key intelligence feeds to Ukraine, including encrypted GPS data critical for precision-guided missiles. A permanent cut-off would render an entire fleet of F-35s useless for any country that defies U.S. demands.
Communications infrastructure is even more vulnerable to enshittification. In just a few years, Elon Musk’s Starlink has grown to make up 65% of all active satellites in orbit, making it an indispensable source of global internet access for countries around the world. Before Trump’s second inauguration, Canada planned to use Starlink to bring broadband to its vast rural regions, Italy was considering it for secure diplomatic communications, and Ukraine already relied on it heavily for frontline military operations. But since Musk joined Trump’s inner circle, dependence on Starlink has become a major national security liability for any country.
In late February, reports emerged that the Trump administration threatened to cut off Starlink access to Ukraine unless Kyiv ceded rights to its critical mineral reserves to the U.S. In a public exchange on X, Musk openly bragged that “Ukraine’s entire front line would collapse” if he turned off Starlink service. When Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski pushed back, noting Poland was paying for Ukraine’s access, Musk dismissed him: “Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”
It’s not just defense and satellite infrastructure. European governments and major banks rely on cloud services run by U.S. giants Amazon and Microsoft, and European leaders now openly worry that Trump could cut off their access to their own critical government data. Microsoft President Brad Smith has claimed this scenario is “exceedingly unlikely” and offered a “binding commitment” to fight any Trump administration order to cut off access through all available legal channels. But Microsoft has yet to publicly explain why it shut down the ICC prosecutor’s email account, and Smith’s promise has done little to ease European fears. The European Commission is now in late-stage negotiations with a European cloud provider to replace Microsoft services for government use, and the Danish government has already begun moving from Microsoft Office to an open-source alternative.
The U.S. tech industry has overwhelmingly aligned itself with Trump’s second term, with CEOs attending his inauguration, rolling back content moderation rules, and reshaping their corporate missions to align with Trump administration priorities. For any company that doesn’t fall in line, coercion gets the job done. The end result is a new hybrid system where commercial platforms and U.S. state power merge into a single, coercive monopoly that serves the administration’s political and financial goals.
In the face of these repeated attacks on their national sovereignty, world leaders who once took U.S. leadership for granted are now openly discussing the once-unthinkable: decoupling from U.S. global infrastructure. In February, after winning Germany’s federal election, center-right leader Friedrich Merz declared live on national TV that his top priority as chancellor would be achieving full independence from the United States. “I never thought I would have to say this on national television,” he added.
A month later, French President Emmanuel Macron echoed the sentiment in a national address, saying “We must reinforce our independence.” Later that month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that Canada’s decades-long special relationship with the U.S. is “over.” In April, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it bluntly: “The West as we knew it no longer exists. Our next great unifying project is an independent Europe.”
But the reality is that declaring independence is much easier than achieving it. For U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea, which depend on American security guarantees to counter China, there is little they can do beyond hope that the Trump administration will leave them alone. Right now, Denmark and Canada are the two allies most directly at risk of U.S. coercion: Trump has openly targeted both Greenland (a Danish autonomous territory) and Canada for potential annexation, and both countries have militaries that are deeply integrated into U.S. defense systems.
“The transatlantic idea was the cornerstone of everything we do,” explains a senior Danish government technology advisor, who requested anonymity due to the issue’s political sensitivity. “For years we pushed back against calls from other allies for European strategic autonomy. Now we’re stuck.” A former Canadian national security advisor notes that the “soft wiring” connecting U.S. and Canadian military systems makes them almost impossible to untangle.
This deep integration explains why both countries have moved so slowly to decouple. In March, the outspoken head of Denmark’s parliamentary defense committee went viral on X for saying Denmark’s purchase of F-35s was a catastrophic mistake: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse,” he tweeted. Yet even now, the Danish government is considering purchasing additional F-35s.
Canada has already built its entire air strike capability around the F-35 platform; switching to an alternative would require billions in retooling and leave the Canadian air force with non-interoperable aircraft, creating more security risks than it solves. “We’re going to look at alternatives, because we can’t make ourselves vulnerable,” the Canadian security advisor says. “But we would then have a non-interoperable air force in our own country.”
The trap is brutal: if allies keep building on U.S. platforms, they become even more vulnerable to American coercion. But if they strike out on their own, they pay a steeper, more immediate price. In March, the Canadian province of Ontario canceled its Starlink contract to bring internet to low-income rural areas. Now Canada will either have to spend far more to build hardwired fiber networks or wait years for its own domestic satellite constellation to launch.
If every ally decoupled across every domain—from weapons systems to cloud services to global finance—it would mean years of economic hardship, leaving everyone poorer. But even with those costs, a growing coalition of world leaders is moving forward with plans to build alternatives.
In Europe, discussions are coalescing around an ambitious initiative called EuroStack, an EU-led digital supply chain that would give Europe full technological independence from the United States and other powers. The idea gained traction months before Trump’s reelection, when a group of business leaders, politicians, and technologists—including Signal President Meredith Whittaker and Taiwan’s former digital minister Audrey Tang—gathered at the European Parliament to discuss European digital independence. “U.S. tech giants don’t just own the services we engage with,” says Cristina Caffarra, an economist who helped organize the meeting. “They own everything below the surface: from chips to connectivity to undersea cables to computing power to cloud. If that infrastructure turns off, we have nowhere to go.”
The sense of urgency has only grown since Trump’s return to office. The German and French governments have already endorsed EuroStack, and major European defense firms like Airbus and Dassault have signed an open letter calling for sovereign European digital infrastructure. “In every European capital, teams of people are calculating what elements should be folded into the effort and what it would cost,” the Danish government advisor says.
EuroStack is just one part of Europe’s response to the enshittification of U.S. hegemony. The EU is also creating a joint European defense fund to help member states purchase weapons from European, not American, suppliers. The European Commission is building its own domestic satellite network that could one day replace Starlink for Ukraine and European countries. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has also openly called for Europe to build its own independent payment and clearing infrastructure, “just in case.”
Robin Berjon, a French computer scientist who spoke at the first EuroStack meeting, acknowledges that the project still lacks full institutional funding and backing, and is more of a grassroots movement than a fully developed policy plan. Even if it succeeds, building independent European infrastructure will be slow, expensive, and the end product will almost certainly lag behind cutting-edge U.S. systems for years. But for Europe, this is no longer a matter of commercial convenience: it is a question of the very future of its democracies and national security.
In the longer term, the United States faces a far more disquieting question: if America no longer runs global platforms that the rest of the world wants to use, who will be left on American networks, and whose interests will they serve?
Doctorow’s framework reminds us that after platform monopolists enshittify the user experience, they eventually turn on their actual paying customers too. U.S. citizens are ostensibly the “customers” of the U.S. government, and they too are already facing the enshittification of American power. As difficult and expensive as it will be for U.S. allies to escape the enshittification of American power, it will be far harder for American citizens to do so—even as the coercive power of the state is increasingly turned against them. As WIRED has documented, the Trump administration has already weaponized federal payment systems against disfavored domestic nonprofits, private businesses, and even progressive U.S. states. Defense contractors like Palantir are merging disparate federal government databases into a single, interconnected surveillance system that can be used to target political opponents at the push of a button.
Eventually, U.S. citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmarish version of their own country: a national-scale version of post-Musk Twitter, where every system works poorly, every tool can be turned against you, and every other country has already left. De-enshittifying the platforms of American power is not just an urgent priority for U.S. allies. It is an existential imperative for the American people too.
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