Who knows what that’s revenge for.

I guess letting a handful of white-collar racist IP lawyers draft your foreign policy isn’t such a good idea after all.

Meh. CTU means stuff comes into e.g. Rotterdam and then easily wherever it needs to go from there, and complaining about “evading sanctions” seems to me like an exercise in futility.

I’m not sure I get that part. Movement of goods within the EU is tax free, so why wouldn’t another country just import it, and move it to, say, Portugal?

I really doubt any sort of US action could lead to the EU fracturing.

If anything, having to deal with the US has brought us closer together. On one side there’s Trump making a fool of himself and of the US. On the other side there’s Musk, thinking he can take on European unions and actually win, because he thinks he’s still in the US, and in the middle there’s what i like to call the sheep pen of tech companies. We shear their wool for fines on privacy violations every couple of months to fund our regulatory organs.

Geopolitics. Whoever isn’t on board with USA (or is suspected not to be) is getting sanctions. Austria and Swiss are neutral (on paper), that’s not really going to fly with “you’re with us or you’re against us” attitude of the US.