Macron’s US Tech Retaliation Stops at Europe’s Own Door

French President Emmanuel Macron told ministers in August 2025 that Europe should not rule out hitting US tech firms after Donald Trump threatened extra tariffs over the Digital Services Act. Trump had just warned of “substantial additional Tariffs” and chip export curbs unless digital taxes and rules he called discriminatory were dropped. More than a year later the bloc’s strongest reply tool has still not been fired.

The services gap Macron pointed to is real. The catch is who collects the bill if Brussels tries to close it by squeezing the platforms that already sit inside the EU.

Macron Told Ministers to Look at US Tech

Trump wrote on Truth Social on 25 August 2025 that “Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology.” He said that unless those “discriminatory actions are removed,” he would “impose substantial additional Tariffs on that Country’s Exports to the U.S.A., and institute Export restrictions on our Highly Protected Technology and Chips.”

He named no country. In Brussels the post was read as a shot at the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, which bind the largest platforms, including those with more than 45 million users in the EU. The warning landed days after Washington and Brussels had settled a goods deal that put a 15 percent tariff on most EU exports to the United States.

A senior French official said Macron told the cabinet Europe “should not exclude taking a look at the digital sector.” A person close to him said going after US platforms now matched his line. He also said, per that official, “The European Union has a big trade deficit with the United States; we need to focus on this.”

He had already aired the same grievance on 30 July 2025, after the goods deal was unveiled, telling ministers the bloc had walked in too soft.

The EU does not yet see itself enough as a power. To be free, one must be feared. We were not sufficiently feared.

Emmanuel Macron, remarks to the French cabinet, 30 July 2025

He added that France would keep a “firm and demanding stance,” that “this is not the end of the story and we will not stop here,” and that further talks should try to rebalance trade, “particularly in the services sector.” Other capitals showed little appetite for opening a second front in software while the 15 percent goods tariff was still being written into law.

Macron Wanted the Services Deficit as a Weapon

Eurostat’s 2024 figures, released in December 2025, put numbers on the complaint. Extra-EU services exports reached €1,568 billion, up 8 percent. Imports were €1,374 billion, up 7 percent. The bloc ran a €194 billion surplus with the rest of the world, the highest in a decade. The United States flipped that picture.

The EU sold €344 billion in services to America, 22 percent of extra-EU exports, and bought €483 billion of services from the United States, 35 percent of extra-EU imports. That is a €139 billion deficit with one partner, large enough for Paris to treat cloud, ads, software and intellectual-property charges as a pressure point.

EU SERVICES TRADE, 2024

A Kiel Institute brief on digitally deliverable services in transatlantic trade has made the same point in plainer language: bits now move faster than boxes, and US firms still collect a heavy share of the European bill. France’s own 3 percent digital services tax, in force since 2019 on firms with €750 million in global revenue and €25 million in France, is a national attempt to skim that flow. It has not changed the Eurostat gap, and it has given Trump a second target besides the DSA.

Ireland Hosts the Firms Paris Wants to Squeeze

The deficit Macron wants to weaponize is booked, in large part, through Dublin. In 2024 Ireland recorded the highest extra-EU services exports of any member, €334 billion, and the highest imports, €356 billion, or 25.9 percent of the EU’s extra-EU services imports. Apple and Google keep European legal homes there. Amazon’s European base sits in Luxembourg. Those entities sell into the single market as local companies, not as cargo on a dock.

Bertin Martens, a senior fellow at Bruegel, has argued that platforms with a real legal presence inside the EU are a poor fit for trade countermeasures under the Anti-Coercion Instrument. A tariff on “US tech” sounds clean in a cabinet room. In company law it often means an Irish or Luxembourg subsidiary, Irish payroll, and Irish corporate tax receipts.

That is the quiet veto. A strike meant to scare Silicon Valley would land first on European ad budgets, on cloud contracts already signed by banks and ministries, and on the Irish accounts that book the traffic. Irish Foreign and Trade Minister Simon Harris, speaking in 2025 when capitals first debated using the instrument against Washington, called that path “the nuclear option” and said it would be “an extraordinary escalation at a time when we must be working for a de-escalation.” Italy, with wine and drugs in the tariff line of fire, took a similar view. Eastern members still treat US security cover as the asset they will not gamble on a digital spat.

The informed argument on X around Macron’s later push to fire the same tool over Greenland ran the same way: Germany will flinch, the Council vote splits, and the weapon stays in the drawer. That reading has matched events. No qualified majority has formed to treat American platforms as a trade hostage.

Why the Anti-Coercion Instrument Stays Holstered

The Anti-Coercion Instrument entered into force on 27 December 2023 as Regulation 2023/2675. The Commission’s own page describes economic coercion as a third country trying to force an EU policy choice by applying, or threatening, measures that hit trade or investment. Trump’s August post, and the later threats over Greenland and digital taxes, sit inside that definition on paper.

The process is slow by design. The Commission examines a case, normally within four months. The Council then has eight to ten weeks to decide that coercion exists. Brussels must ask the third country to stop, then consult, and only then may it adopt last-resort response measures on services and public procurement, plus goods, investment, financial markets, intellectual property and export controls. Member states speak in an examination procedure before the Commission acts.

WHAT THE 2023 TOOL CAN TOUCH

• Goods duties: New or higher customs charges, including above most-favoured-nation rates.
• Services and data: Limits on cross-border digital and professional services.
• Investment and tenders: Curbs on foreign direct investment and on bids for public contracts.
• Intellectual property: Trade-related limits on IP rights inside the EU.
• Money and chips: Measures on financial markets, Union funding and export controls.

Macron has asked more than once for that list to be used. In January 2026, after Trump threatened extra tariffs over Greenland, the Élysée said France would seek activation. At Davos he called the instrument “a powerful instrument” and said it was “crazy” the EU might deploy it “for the very first time, vis-a-vis the US.” Germany preferred to keep it in reserve. Ireland called it extreme. The file did not move.

The unused tool is the story, not a prelude. Europe built a legal bazooka for a China-style squeeze, then discovered the first live candidate was the ally that hosts its cloud, its app stores and a large share of its digital ads. Firing it at those firms would punish the customer as much as the vendor. Leaving it unused is why Macron can say the EU is “not feared enough” and still be describing the same week’s cabinet minutes a year later.

Trump’s August Warning Never Left the Table

The 25 August 2025 post was not a one-off. It sat on top of a February 2025 executive order on “overseas extortion and unfair fines,” a State Department lobbying drive against the DSA, and later visa curbs on Thierry Breton, a former commissioner tied to the file, plus four other Europeans. Macron answered those visa limits in public. The digital rules, he wrote, were adopted by Parliament and the Council and “are not meant to be determined outside Europe.”

France condemns the visa restriction measures taken by the United States against Thierry Breton and four other European figures.

These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty.…

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) December 24, 2025

Each later flare-up reused the same two levers, goods tariffs and digital rules, without Brussels converting Macron’s cabinet line into a services strike.

THE TRANSATLANTIC DIGITAL CLOCK

1. 27 December 2023: The Anti-Coercion Instrument enters into force and is not used.
2. July 2025: Washington and Brussels settle a goods deal with a 15 percent tariff on most EU exports.
3. 30 July 2025: Macron tells the cabinet the EU was “not sufficiently feared” and flags services.
4. 25 August 2025: Trump threatens extra tariffs and chip export curbs over digital taxes and rules.
5. Late August 2025: Macron tells ministers not to rule out the digital sector as a reply.
6. 24 December 2025: France condemns US visa curbs on Breton and other Europeans tied to digital rules.
7. 8 January 2026: Macron tells French ambassadors the DSA and DMA are “two regulatations to defend, to consolidate.”
8. 18 January 2026: France asks the EU to activate the unused instrument over Greenland tariffs; it stays unused.
9. 15 June 2026: Trump threatens a 100 percent tariff on French wine unless Paris drops its 3 percent digital services tax; Macron says “that is not how it works.”
10. 26 June 2026: Trump warns that any country imposing a digital services tax faces a 100 percent tariff on all goods, meant to override existing deals.
11. 25 September 2026: The US Justice Department files to back X’s court fight against a Digital Services Act fine, with Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate saying Washington “will not tolerate” Commission “regulatory overreach.”

The French tax is still 3 percent. Ministers vetoed an October 2025 Assembly vote, 296 to 58, that would have doubled it to 6 percent. The United States still takes about 21 percent of French wine and spirits exports, which is why a wine tariff is a sharper hostage than a cloud fee Europe charges itself.

France Still Runs on American Software

Macron’s other line is digital sovereignty. In Berlin on 18 November 2025 he said Europe did not want to be a “vassal” of US or Chinese tech and called for a “European preference,” starting with public procurement. “You cannot delegate the whole functioning of your democracy to the Magnificent Seven,” he said. Cities in France, Germany and the Netherlands have begun moving office software off US defaults. The European Parliament switched its default search to the French engine Qwant.

The French state’s own stack has not followed the speech. A National Assembly inquiry led by deputies Philippe Latombe and Cyrielle Chatelain, released in summer 2026, found French administrations still lean on US suppliers to a degree the authors compared with imported energy. Those dependencies, they wrote, are “now an extra lever of threats.” Microsoft, the inquiry noted, received 5,587 disclosure requests from the US government in the second half of 2025 and granted 75 percent of them.

That is the irony in one filing. The president who wants US platforms treated as trade leverage presides over ministries that rent the same platforms. EU capitals have said in private that “deleting US tech is not realistic.” A retaliation aimed at American cloud and ads would bill those ministries, and the companies that buy media from Google and Meta, long before it dented Cupertino or Menlo Park.

Steel Duties Become the New Lever on Digital Rules

By early October 2026 the goods deal was still the 15 percent ceiling, the DSA was still in force, and US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had tied any cut in the 50 percent steel and aluminum tariffs to looser EU digital rules. Paris reads that linkage as a breach of the July 2025 truce. Washington reads the DSA, the DMA and national digital taxes as the same “discriminatory” file Trump named on 25 August 2025.

Macron can still tell ministers to look at the digital sector. Eurostat will still print a €139 billion services hole with the United States. Ireland will still book the traffic. The 2023 instrument will still list services, tenders and intellectual property as lawful replies. None of that, on present votes, produces a shot.