2026-11-07 04:31:07
European tech policy leaders are cautious.
Democrats won both chambers of Congress, many of whom campaigned on reigning in tech billionaires, curtailing energy-intensive data centers, and imposing artificial intelligence safety rules. These positions could bring US tech policy much closer to Europe’s strict approach.
But European politicians and analysts warned against exaggerated expectations. A lame-duck President Donald Trump retains the key powers over trade, tech, and foreign policy.
“Trump retains extensive foreign policy powers and a legislative veto,” says Javier Carbonell, a policy analyst at the European Policy Center. “His reaction remains unpredictable: domestic constraints could even encourage greater international activism. Europeans should not mistake electoral change for a return to transatlantic normality.”
The Trump administration has been aggressive in its opposition to European tech rules, denouncing them for targeting Silicon Valley success stories. After the European Commission fined Google in July under the new Digital Markets Act, President Trump called the penalties “Illegal” and “highly discriminatory.” The President spoke about launching a formal Section 301 trade investigation to probe whether the law unfairly disadvantages US commerce — and threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs if the fines are not reversed.
Beyond trade, the administration accused European digital laws of censorship. House Republicans held a hearing called “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation: Part II.” Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, retained his seat but will lose his committee position when Democrats take control.
The committee’s Democrats hold different opinions. They rejected their Republican colleagues’ claims, insisting that European governments have legitimate reasons to regulate illegal content.
The biggest transatlantic convergence could come over AI safety and data centers. Many Democrats campaigned against energy-gobbling data centers. In 10 states, voters approved moves to place moratoriums on new data center construction.
Moves to impose similar data center moratoriums are emerging in Europe. Just days after the US midterm elections, more than 100 civil society and environmental groups launched a massive, coordinated “Stop Dirty Data Centres” wave of protests across 15 European countries.
AI safety represents another potential point of rapprochement. The elections may signal the end of the US “self-policing” strategy. Democratic leaders have pledged to upend this laissez-faire approach and are working on rules around AI safety that they could now push through with a congressional majority. Some Republicans have already joined them.
Europe has already passed an AI Act. It imposes strict requirements on high-risk AI and bans certain use cases, including, with narrow exceptions, live facial recognition by law enforcement in publicly accessible spaces. Companies producing general-purpose AI models deemed to pose systemic risks must test their models and take steps to reduce those risks. Breaking these rules can bring fines of up to €15 million or 3% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher. For large companies, fines for banned AI practices can reach €35 million or 7% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher.
This fall, France pushed for a G7 agreement to coordinate safety evaluations of advanced AI models and share information about risks and incidents through a new high-level working group. The Trump administration scuttled the agreement as “unnecessary bureaucracy.”
Another irritant is Europe’s fear of a “kill switch.” US export controls on advanced AI semiconductors, since reversed, fueled calls for “digital sovereignty.” The recent shutoff of Starlink in Ukraine added to European worries. A democratic Congress could attempt to calm these fears.
Democrats have also pushed for a federal privacy law limiting how companies collect and use personal information. That could narrow the gap with Europe, where privacy concerns have generated numerous court cases calling for a stop to transatlantic data transfers. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework allows personal data to flow. Congress could make those protections harder for a president to reverse by writing them into legislation.
An irony looms over the shift of power in Washington. The Democratic-controlled Congress looks set to increase tech regulation — just while Europe is moving to “simplify” and roll back some of its regulation in the name of increased competitiveness.
In the US, “sentiment towards the AI industry — the backbone of the current US economy — is souring,” notes Koen de Leus, Chief Economist of BNP Paribas Fortis. “Europe, on the other hand, is gradually — very slowly — moving in the opposite direction,” aiming to make “doing business across the Union easier.”
Transatlantic convergence could be possible. The allies, long divided over tech, might meet somewhere in the middle.
William Echikson is a non-resident Senior Fellow at CEPA and editor of Bandwidth.
Dr. Anda Bologa is a Brussels-based Senior Researcher at CEPA.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-11-06 23:53:40
Over half of the names the EU added to its sanctions in October are aimed at the production chain of the ballistic missiles now targeting Ukrainian cities, chief diplomat Kaja Kallas said. The list of 826 Russian companies and 743 of their chief executives is the EU’s largest-ever set of military-industrial listings.
A couple of days later, the Council added 12 more names for helping Russia evade sanctions, among them oil intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates and India.
Yet October avoided the politically difficult decisions. No new sector-wide trade ban, and nothing on oil or gas.
Europe has two problems with its Russia sanctions: any one of the bloc’s 27 members can insist that its special interests are protected, and the rules already agreed are enforced unevenly.
July showed how the first problem works. The package passed only after Greece secured an exemption allowing EU operators to carry Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) to third countries under pre-invasion contracts. A proposed ban on Russian fish imports was dropped along the way.
Every sector-wide measure affects businesses among the 27 members. Every capital has a veto.
Even a list of sanctioned individuals has owners. Estonia, among the bloc’s toughest on Moscow, asked for a Russian company and one individual to be removed from the October draft because it supplies rare earths.
Slovakia had demanded since March that the billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman come off the list. In September, France joined the push on Usmanov, and both men were removed in exchange for a three-year renewal of the rest.
Slovakia, meanwhile, still imports Russian crude through the Druzhba pipeline (as does Hungary) under an exemption from 2022, granted on the condition that they phase it out as soon as possible. Imports rose instead.
In September alone, Slovakia paid Russia €229m ($258m) for Druzhba crude and €161m for pipeline gas; in the EU, only Hungary and France paid more. On October 26, Slovak foreign minister Juraj Blanár was in Moscow, discussing energy with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, including Russian gas that EU law bans from autumn 2027.
The oil exemption’s main beneficiary is MOL Group, which controls the refineries in both Slovakia and Hungary.
Terminating an exemption requires unanimity. The Commission had a way around that by imposing a ban on Russian oil by majority vote, and did the same for gas in January. It was postponed in March amid rising prices caused by war in Iran.
Weapons supply chain sanctions are also hard to enforce. Ukrainian military intelligence expects Russia to build around 700 Iskander ballistic missiles this year, many of them packed with Western-made parts. The October listings identify Russian suppliers, with chips reaching Russia through third-country front companies that are cheap to establish and cheap to replicate.
The oil price cap, the ban on fuels refined from Russian crude and the port bans are law already. Applying them is mostly a national job, and the picture here is very mixed.
In September, seven shipments from refineries processing Russian crude reached EU ports, including six from India’s Jamnagar, with three landing in Italy. EU guidance treats such cargoes as high-risk. Italian customs can ask importers where the fuel came from. Regulators can check insurers that accepted dubious price attestations.
No Council vote is required for this. It needs customs investigators, evidence and lawyers, and the state can lose in court. Agreeing to new rules in Brussels costs a government nothing. Enforcing the old ones at home costs money and political capital. Many prefer the first. Where governments push, it often works. On October 12, the French navy boarded the tanker DF Peak south of Réunion for sailing without a valid flag. It was France’s fifth such operation this year. It is now held at Réunion and may be confiscated.
According to the Centre for Research on Clean Energy and Air (CREA), there were 48 shadow tankers under false flags at the end of September, against 120 a year earlier. It credited coastal-state detentions and pressure on flag registries. Comparable progress is harder to find in origin checks on refined fuel and scrutiny of price attestations.
The power of EU unanimity faced and failed its latest test on October 25. The Council was required to review, on the Commission’s assessment, whether to switch on a ban on selling LNG tankers to Russia. The date passed, and no ban was announced.
Russia’s Arctic gas plant, Yamal, needs special ice-breaking tankers. Greece’s Dynagas runs five of them. Without a ban, CREA warns, they could be sold to Chinese co-owners, and Europe would lose its say over them. Any ban would need all 27 votes.
It is certainly true that EU sanctions impose costs on Russia, but it is equally true to say these are greatly lessened by the actions of member states focused on sectoral interests at home and less on the system’s efficiency.
Miro Sedlák is a senior energy sector executive, a security and defense studies doctoral candidate at the Armed Forces Academy of General M.R. Štefánik, Slovakia and an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute for Central Europe.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-11-06 05:50:35
A Belgian butcher is awakened at 3:30 in the morning by an employee reporting a problem with his refrigeration system. When he reaches his shop, temperatures have climbed to 18° Celsius. He estimates that about $17,000 worth of meat has been ruined. Elsewhere in Europe, supermarket workers have discovered similar problems.
The refrigeration attacks were reported in early November, around the same time that European airlines faced a wave of anonymous bomb threats. On the worst day so far, November 5, at least 21 flights had been targeted, prompting diversions, security inspections, and disruption to airline schedules. There is no established connection between the two sets of incidents.
Supermarket chill cabinets and short-haul airline flights are not what most Europeans picture when they hear about Russia’s shadow war. They think of espionage, cyberattacks against government networks, suspicious fires at defense factories, or damaged infrastructure in the Baltic Sea. These are serious threats, but for most people they remain distant. A disrupted neighborhood grocery store or a grounded holiday flight is different. It brings the consequences home.
There is no publicly established evidence that Russia was behind these incidents, and that distinction matters. But so does the vulnerability they exposed.
Most people understand cybersecurity through information technology: stolen passwords, compromised email accounts, ransomware, and the theft of personal information. Far fewer are familiar with operational technology, or OT, even though they depend on it every day.
OT controls physical processes. It regulates refrigeration equipment in supermarkets, pumps and chemical treatment in municipal water systems, machinery in factories, and equipment across electrical grids and transportation networks. These systems make modern societies function.
Compromising these systems can have physical consequences, ranging from spoiled food and interrupted production to electrical outages or unsafe water treatment. The severity depends on the equipment involved, the attacker’s access, and the safeguards in place.
Much of this equipment was designed for reliability and long service lives, often before cybersecurity became a central consideration. Remote connectivity has improved efficiency and maintenance, but it has also introduced new vulnerabilities. Equipment that once required physical access can sometimes be reached through poorly protected network connections.
The refrigeration incidents illustrate the problem. Attackers reportedly manipulated remotely accessible controllers, changing temperatures and interfering with normal operations. The technology involved was neither exotic nor uniquely sensitive. It was ordinary commercial infrastructure performing an essential function.
Europe’s OT vulnerabilities are as much an institutional problem as a technical one. Much of this infrastructure is owned and operated by private companies, utilities, and local authorities. Responsibility for its protection is divided among operators, manufacturers, regulators, and security agencies, often across national boundaries. Hostile actors can exploit those seams. Governments need clearer arrangements for sharing threat information, identifying common vulnerabilities, and coordinating responses across jurisdictions.
Russia is a reasonable line of inquiry, but not a conclusion. European security services have documented Russian sabotage, cyber operations, and the use of recruited intermediaries to disrupt European interests, particularly support for Ukraine. Latvia’s State Security Service, among others, has described the use of intermediaries to distance Russian intelligence services from operations on the ground.
There is also precedent for the use of anonymous bomb threats as a means of disruption. Ukraine’s Security Service attributed extensive bomb-hoax campaigns in 2021 and early 2022 to Russia, including threats against schools, government buildings, transport facilities, and other civilian targets. That history warrants attention, but it does not establish responsibility for the current incidents.
A suspicious warehouse fire in one country, a railway disruption in another, and an intrusion into commercial equipment elsewhere may never be examined together. Some incidents will prove unrelated. Others may be part of a coordinated campaign. The difficulty is recognizing the difference before repeated disruptions impose costs that exceed the damage from any individual event.
The distinction between individual incidents and a coordinated campaign is therefore critical. Recognizing a pattern is not the same as proving that every event belongs to it. But treating each incident in isolation can obscure the larger picture.
European governments also need agreed options for responding when Russian responsibility is established. Those options should be developed in advance, calibrated to the evidence and the activity involved, and designed to impose costs that change Moscow’s calculations rather than simply register disapproval.
The need to impose costs does not diminish the importance of protecting vulnerable infrastructure. An adversary does not need to penetrate a military network or destroy a major power station to disrupt civilian life.
A poorly secured controller, an exposed remote connection, or a compromised service provider may provide an easier route to disruption.
The refrigeration attacks have not been publicly attributed. Criminals and state-directed actors can exploit the same vulnerabilities, and the technical characteristics of an intrusion do not necessarily establish who directed it or why.
Assigning responsibility to Russia without evidence would be irresponsible. But attribution and protection are different decisions.
Establishing responsibility for an attack, particularly when considering punitive action against another state, demands credible evidence. Securing vulnerable infrastructure does not.
European governments must work harder, in partnership with operators and manufacturers, to identify exposed OT systems, restrict remote access, and ensure that essential processes can continue safely if network connections are compromised. Equally important, they need arrangements that allow technical indicators and threat reporting to move quickly among cybersecurity authorities, intelligence services, law enforcement, and private operators, including across national borders.
Resilience alone is insufficient. Europe also needs to become a more difficult operating environment for hostile intelligence services and their proxies. That requires exposing hostile activity when the evidence supports it, hardening vulnerable systems, disrupting the networks and intermediaries enabling attacks, and imposing meaningful costs on those responsible.
The objective should be to prevent individual disruptions from accumulating into strategic advantage.
The immediate consequences of these incidents are spoiled food and financial losses. The longer-term concern is confidence in the systems people depend on but rarely think about.
Europeans expect electricity, safe drinking water, and reliable food supplies. They also expect their governments to understand threats and respond effectively. An adversary seeking to undermine public confidence need not cause catastrophic damage. Repeated disruptions, particularly when responsibility remains unclear, may be enough to raise doubts about whether essential services can be trusted.
European governments need to avoid two mistakes: treating every unexplained disruption as a Russian operation, and treating uncertainty about attribution as a reason to defer protective action. The first undermines credibility. The second leaves vulnerabilities available for the next attacker.
The refrigeration attacks and airline bomb threats may ultimately prove unrelated to Russia—or to one another. Both nevertheless demonstrate how relatively modest actions can disrupt ordinary life, impose economic costs, and test public confidence in essential services.
Europe cannot wait for Russian fingerprints before protecting the systems its citizens depend on.
David M. Cattler is a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a senior transatlantic security leader with more than 35 years of experience across the US government, NATO, and the Intelligence Community. Most recently, he served as Director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and was previously NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security, the alliance’s senior intelligence official. Cattler is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and Georgetown University and was an MIT Seminar XXI Fellow.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-11-06 02:02:38
Genocide, as set out in the UN’s 1948 convention, has a 26-word definition that has caused problems its authors probably never imagined.
The convention sums up the crime thus: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.” It then lists those acts, including killing or otherwise harming the group.
But that apparently simple sentence contains a chain of ambiguities. Is Ukraine a genocide? Is Gaza? Or the October 7 attacks in Israel? Reaching back to the past, is it true to describe European or Arab slavers as guilty of genocide (if the convention had existed then)?
The answer depends partly on interpretation. This is in vivid contrast to other war law, where meanings are clear. The International Criminal Court’s statute, for instance, has no problem explaining two of its core crimes: war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. There are no ambiguities. No disputes. Everyone can understand them. But the third core crime is different. Genocide’s definition radiates uncertainty.
The first issue is that genocide is not concerned with the scale of a crime, no matter how horrific. It is all about intent. This makes it the equivalent of a “hate crime”, where you have to prove not just a crime but the motivation behind it. In the clunky language of the convention, prosecutors must prove atrocities were committed to destroy a group.
And that’s where the problems begin, because only four groups are covered. Crimes against groups not in the definition get a pass. Destroying a group because of its political, cultural, or geographical makeup is not included – you could wipe out an entire city, and it would not qualify as genocide.
It sounds absurd, but that is the reality of a convention famed for its vagueness. This took center stage when the United Nations set up a tribunal in Cambodia to try the Khmer Rouge in 2006. The regime had orchestrated one of the bloodiest mass killings in history, killing and enslaving millions of fellow Khmers. But most victims were from the same national group as their tormentors. They were targeted for political, economic, or social reasons, none of them among the four specified groups. Thus, no genocide.
While there were ultimately convictions for genocide (because the Khmer Rouge also erased two minority ethnic groups), prosecutors had to settle for other charges to cover the main atrocities.
Genocide also fails to make clear what is meant by “destroy”. Obviously, it applies to an annihilation such as the Holocaust, or the slaughter of 800,000 in Rwanda. But what about devastation that wrecks communities? Lawyers are unable to agree.
Nor do they agree about what “part” means. Some lawyers say it means “substantial part”, but that is not what the convention says. The laws of war are supposed to be written in plain language, not legalese, because soldiers go into battle without lawyers by their side. In plain language, “part” can mean just one. Many lawyers resist this, because it would mean genocide is not reserved for massacres, but for any atrocity involving discrimination.
For years, these uncertainties were confined to legal circles. But now, with wars raging around the world, the word is on everyone’s lips. That has spawned a cottage industry of scholars and activists arguing rival interpretations. Each, in their narrow sense, can be right. And also wrong. Because a law with multiple meanings breaks the contract between rulers and the ruled, in which the ruled obey the law and rulers make that law clear.
The reason for this mess is that when the convention was conceived, it wasn’t really needed as a legal instrument. At the time, the newly-formed UN was determined to record its horror at the Holocaust and mass slaughter of World War II. It wanted to mark this outrage by writing a new law. The problem was, laws against mass extermination already existed, and had indeed been used in the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials.
Making a new law that duplicated existing laws made no sense. Genocide gave them the solution. It would cover the same ground as existing laws, but with an extra demand to prove intent. Yet the vagueness of that intent — to destroy a group — has left lawyers arguing about it ever since.
The convention was crafted by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. He had escaped Nazism, but lost dozens of relatives in the Holocaust. For years he campaigned for a law to recognize the abomination of wiping out an entire people. He even invented the word for it, by combining the Greek word for a race or people — genos — with the Latin for killing — cide.
“It is nothing but frustrating as a legal document,” says Dr Anne O’Byrne, Professor of Philosophy at New York’s Stony Brook University, and author of The Genocide Paradox. “But it was seen as an expression of revulsion at something that shocked the conscience of the world.”
Writing the convention was chaotic. Governments were wary of adopting a law that might one day entrap them, and kept raising objections. The Soviet Union, in particular, demanded the four-group limit, because it was sending thousands to the gulag and wanted groups that were political or social to be excluded. In the end, the authors decided a vague convention was better than no convention at all.
Lemkin himself was dismayed by the pared-down result. Near the end of his life, he wrote, “The rain of my work fell on a fallow plain.”
Since then, the world had opportunities to iron out the problems of the convention, but none were taken.
Fixing the problem is simple, but awkward. Rewrite the convention. Make it plain, like every other war law. And apply it to all groups, not just some.
One option would be to use the definition of extermination, now listed as a Crime Against Humanity. To prove extermination, you don’t need to prove the reason behind a massacre, because nobody commits a massacre by accident. Arguing about whether a mass killing has the specific intent to qualify as genocide misses the larger point, which is that annihilation is always a terrible crime.
Chris Stephen is a former war correspondent with The Guardian. He has written on war crimes justice matters for publications including The Hill, International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Counsel, the magazine of the bar association of England and Wales. He is author of The Future of War Crimes Justice, (Melville House, London and New York) and Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Atlantic Books, London and New York).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-11-06 01:49:49
America’s midterms have accelerated the departure of the Atlanticist generation, the lawmakers who built and defended transatlantic coalitions in the decades after the Cold War. With some retiring and others being swept out, the bipartisan coalition that kept Europe and Ukraine high on Congress’s agenda is now much thinner.
The champions for Ukraine and the US-European alliance who did not run for re-election include Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and John Cornyn (R-TX); along with representatives Mike McCaul (R-TX) and Don Bacon (R-NE); and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Their international relationships, decades of experience, and political skills will go with them when the new Congress arrives in January.
This shift in Congress is partly the result of generational change, as longtime members depart because of age or disputes with the Republican leadership. Many politicians first elected in previous decades saw NATO and Ukraine as core to American security. Shaheen and Tillis revived the Senate NATO Observer Group and pushed for Ukraine aid, as well as a firm line on Russia. McConnell’s lifetime of work as a defense appropriator greatly helped Ukraine’s defense, and he spoke out when aid was cut. Don Bacon worked across party lines to defend America’s NATO commitments and advance military cooperation with Ukraine. Lindsey Graham’s legacy will live on through his Russian Sanctions Act, although the legislation’s tough provisions have been waived by the White House, for now at least.
The second group of leavers was election night casualties. Familiar names included Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), a former House Intelligence committee Chairman and one of the most prominent Republican voices on defense policy, who lost the Dayton area seat he has held for over two decades. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), a co-chair of the House Ukraine caucus, was defeated, and Moldova champion Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) conceded. Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-ME) decades-long career fell short of a sixth term.
This pattern matters. The Republicans most willing to break with their party on European security will no longer be present to keep the issue on the table. Democrats now hold majorities in both chambers, which significantly strengthens their hand in setting the agenda and negotiating with the White House.
So, is the result good or bad for Ukraine? In principle, good. For two years, a Republican Congress largely left Ukraine policy to the White House. Outgoing Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) kept the Ukraine Support Act off the House floor for more than a year, until a bipartisan majority in the Republican-controlled House used a discharge petition this summer to force a vote, passing over $1.3bn in additional aid. The Russian sanctions bill then passed the Senate 86-12, and again in the House 262-159. Lawmakers made clear with their votes that the administration’s recent approach to Moscow is the anomaly.
With Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) poised to become House Speaker, Ukraine legislation will no longer need a procedural revolt to reach the floor. Yet it is unclear how pro-Ukraine sentiment might manifest itself; many of the new Democratic legislators are moderates – not the far-left progressives many Europeans fret about – but will probably not have Ukraine and NATO high on their list of priorities.
Democrats will still need Republican votes to move legislation through the Senate and to override any potential vetoes, a threat the president has already made. That requires two-thirds majorities in both chambers. Many of the Republicans who supplied some of those votes are leaving. Nothing guarantees that like-minded members will fill the seats left behind, and rebuilding that bipartisan coalition now falls to the incoming class.
Pocketbook issues dominated voters’ decision-making, which suggests that while Ukraine still matters to voters, it will not be top of mind for legislators in the new Congress, as there is a clear signal to get the homeland in order before offering support abroad. While Ukraine and European security will likely not be a priority at the start of the new Congress, US voters have not rejected Europe. Most Republicans (63%) and Democrats (60%) still believe that the US should take an active role in world affairs, giving freshmen room to step up and lead on these issues without paying a political price. And if cost is what concerns voters, that then strengthens the case for engagement. Deterring Russia is far cheaper than fighting a new world war.
Once the new Congress settles, Washington will have every reason to lend its greater support to Kyiv and its allies. Ukraine’s forces have spent years adapting under fire, and their battlefield innovations are already feeding back into the US and European defense industries. Just as important, their experience offers a preview of what modern war will demand, and now there are fewer Republican roadblocks in the way.
The problems Ukraine is solving today will confront US forces tomorrow. For a freshman, that translates into concrete gains for constituents, including defense industry jobs in their districts and a boosted “wartime” economy.
The administration’s push for burden-sharing has made the alliance a better deal for the US, giving Congress another reason to stay engaged. Nearly all NATO members have committed to spending 5% of GDP on defense and security infrastructure by 2035, and Germany has built a political consensus behind major military investment. That gives both parties a good argument: Republicans can claim burden-sharing as a win, and Democrats can point to a stronger, renewed alliance.
The Atlanticist contingent has not been altogether wiped out, though it is smaller than it was projected to be just a week ago. In the Senate, Roger Wicker (R-MS), who chairs the Armed Services Committee until January, just returned from Kyiv, and Katie Britt (R-AL) has positioned herself to carry on Graham’s sanctions work. Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Angus King (I-ME) are the recommended successors to lead the NATO observer group in the new Congress.
In the House, Ukraine Caucus Co-chair Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) held her seat in a district redrawn to favor Republicans, and fellow co-chair Joe Wilson (R-SC) narrowly won reelection. Rep. Fitzpatrick’s defeat opens a Republican co-chair position, likely to be filled by David Joyce (R-OH) or Steve Womack (R-AR).
There is also a strong European bench in the new Congress of Democratic Atlanticists, including Reps. Jim Costa (D-CA), Bill Keating (D-MA), Mike Quigley (D-IL), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Deborah Ross (D-NC), and Brendan Boyle (D-PA). This group offers an experienced foundation that can help guide incoming members on European and Ukrainian policy.
These midterm elections marked more than a changing of the guard in Congress. For decades, Europe could count on a generation of lawmakers whose ideals were rooted in shared experiences of living through the aftermath of the Cold War. The transatlantic relationship does not enjoy the political consensus of that era, and nostalgia will not carry the alliance into its next chapter.
US leadership is itself worth protecting. It is a force multiplier, from trade to security, and it allows the US to shape the global security agenda. That matters more than ever as China and Russia wage a shadow war against the West.
Europeans should be spending the lame duck period strategizing how they can work with, and capitalize on, a more Europe-friendly Congress.
Daniel Gaffin is the Program Officer for Congressional Engagement and Strategic Partnerships at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Daniel leads CEPA’s congressional engagement strategy, overseeing bipartisan outreach on Capitol Hill and coordinating high-level engagements that advance the organization’s policy priorities.
Alina Kreynovich is a Program Assistant for External Affairs at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She supports CEPA’s convenings with US and transatlantic stakeholders.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-11-04 23:42:18
European powers must urgently break Elon Musk’s near-monopoly over military communications. It won’t be easy. It won’t be cheap. It won’t happen fast. But it’s necessary to ensure no one man can repeat the trillionaire’s treatment of Ukraine in early October, when he throttled Ukraine’s access to the Starlink and Starshield satellite systems now central to its military operations.
Starlink is a commercial satellite communications service, with Starshield a more capable military version. Both belong to Musk’s SpaceX. Ukraine — and many other Western powers, for that matter — relies on them for an array of vital military functions. They connect troops to their headquarters and drones to their operators.
Overnight and without warning in mid-October, thousands of satellite terminals failed in Ukraine. Operators discovered that SpaceX had imposed a speed limit of approximately 160 kmh (100 mph) or slower. Above that speed, a drone couldn’t connect to its operator. Many of the faster drones, including interceptor drones that Ukraine uses to defeat Russia’s own attack drones, couldn’t function.
Musk lifted the speed limit after around a week and eventually said he had ordered the restrictions because Ukraine had violated the satellite provider’s terms and conditions of service by using Starlink for offensive rather than defensive missions. Ukrainian officials denied that.
The problem isn’t going away. Starlink and Starshield are the world’s most flexible, affordable, and robust SATCOM services. For a small monthly fee, as low as $55 a month for private users in the United States, a subscriber gains access to a constellation of 11,000 signal-relaying satellites in low Earth orbit. Nearly 14 million people pay for Starlink.
No other SATCOM service can compare. But Europe had better build one, and fast, if it wants to preclude future disruptions. Fortunately for Europe, there are alternatives. Unfortunately for Europe, they don’t exist at nearly the scale the continent may require.
To ensure around-the-clock coverage everywhere, a SATCOM service needs thousands of satellites effectively blanketing Earth. SpaceX has already spent tens of billions of dollars developing, building, launching, operating, and replacing those 11,000 (and counting) satellites since 2015. The firm will continue spending big to expand the constellation.
Every rival service is playing catch-up. French SATCOM firm Eutelsat has fewer than 700 satellites in orbit, and plans to increase this to 1,300 by 2030. Luxembourg operator SES has slightly more than 100 satellites. Spanish operator Hisdesat has two satellites. The EU-backed $15.6bn IRIS2 program will begin launching satellites in 2029, and the German military plans its own network of “Fritzboxes”. But the ramp-up will take years, even if money were no issue.
But money is an issue. The war in Ukraine, and the United States’ increasing mercurialness as an ally, have served as a painful reminder of Europe’s military capability gaps. They are myriad. In particular, Europe lacks a deep stock of long-range land-attack munitions and also lacks long-range air-defense systems with anti-ballistic-missile capability. For land attack, Europe still mostly counts on the United States and its Tomahawk cruise missiles. For air defense, American-made Patriot, Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) and Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) batteries still provide the vast majority of coverage.
The Europeans are moving swiftly to address the deep strike gap but are moving much slower to develop a true alternative to Patriot, THAAD and SM-3. The Franco-Italian SAMP/T is the only available replacement, but the Eurosam consortium builds embarrassingly low numbers of batteries and Aster missiles for them to launch. Europe’s inability to solve its air defense problem bodes ill for any near-term solution to the SATCOM gap.
It could pivot away from SATCOM, of course. There are other ways to connect drones to their operators and infantry to their commanders, including mesh radio networks and fiber-optic hardlines. Some drones can even piggyback on commercial 5G networks. AI guidance means some drones can navigate entirely on their own without any operator input.
But the Ukrainians have learned the hard way to layer their communications. Every connection has a back-up, and a back-up for that back-up. SATCOM is a reliable backstop for other communications. If, in the current war or some future war, Musk decides to align against Europe and throttles or yanks Starlink and Starshield, countries will be left scrambling.
Unless they spend big, now.
David Axe is a journalist, author, and filmmaker in South Carolina. For 20 years, he has covered war for Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, The Village Voice, Voice of America, and others. He has reported from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. His current focus is on covering Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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