Big Tech Is Not the “Main Enemy”: Techno-Nationalist Opposition to America Is Nothing New

In every wave of U.S. industrial leadership, other nations have attacked American multinationals, especially tech firms, for blatantly protectionist reasons.

In 2024, I met with a senior EU official who was instrumental in drafting the Draghi Report on the future of European competitiveness. I asked him about the motivation for the report. He said: reducing Europe’s techno-economic dependency on China and the United States.

If I had been less polite, I would have blurted out, “Are you out of your damn mind?” I would have then followed up with three questions—none of which would have been polite either, but all of which would have been deadly serious given today’s daunting reality:

1. Do you not see that it is the Chinese Communist Party, not America, that seeks global techno-economic hegemony?

2. Are you unaware that the EU’s industrial base, chemicals, vehicles, machine tools, and the like, is far more vulnerable to Chinese techno-economic coercion than America’s?

3. Do you not realize that you are playing directly into Beijing’s divide-and-conquer strategy?

But all I actually said was, “Why are you including America? We are capitalists—we’d sell you the leverage you intend to use against us.” Alas, my pleas fell on deaf ears.

The Draghi Report, and the EU more broadly, settled into the trap of seeing the United States as the “main enemy,” to use Mao’s term. In particular, U.S. multinationals, especially technology firms, are cast in that role. Defenders of the Draghi Report will deny this, but the evidence is there in black and white (not to mention what you can glean by reading between the lines).

For example, on page 7, the report states: “These dependencies are often two-way—for example, China relies on the EU to absorb its industrial overcapacity—but other major economies like the U.S. are actively trying to disentangle themselves. If the EU does not act, we risk being vulnerable to coercion.” Note the phrasing. Not vulnerable to coercion from China, but implicitly from both China and the United States.

The report continues on page 34: “For reasons of European sovereignty, the EU should ensure that it has a competitive domestic industry that can meet the demand for ‘sovereign cloud’ solutions,” explicitly positioning these efforts against U.S. providers. On page 57, it adds: “The EU relies on foreign countries for over 80% of digital products, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property,” the overwhelming share of which comes from the United States.

The EU is far from alone in seeing the United States and American technology firms as principal enemies. A growing number of countries have ramped up aggressive efforts to constrain U.S. multinationals within their borders. These include Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and many others.

ITIF’s Big Tech Policy Tracker documents a list of policy assaults that disproportionately target leading U.S. technology firms with restrictive or extractive rules, reducing their ability to innovate while conveniently advantaging Chinese competitors.

Flying under the cover of supposedly legitimate public policy concerns, these actions should be understood for what they are: nationalist attacks on American economic power. Congress and the Trump administration need to stand up to these governments and say, clearly and unequivocally: “Enough is enough. Continue down this path, and the United States will retaliate.”

A Familiar Pattern: How Nations Have Long Sought to Constrain U.S. Multinationals

To be sure, none of this is new. What is new is the intensity of the backlash and the fact that it is now consistently aimed at America’s most strategic and cutting-edge industries.

In each wave of U.S. industrial leadership and multinational expansion, other nations have fought back, rejecting and attacking American firms for blatantly protectionist reasons.

Developing Nations

Latin America was at the forefront of opposition to U.S. corporate power. The region had long experience with American firms dominating key sectors of its economy, such as agriculture, mining, and oil. And because of domestic mismanagement and corruption, many countries failed to develop competitive homegrown industries. So, riding the intellectual wave of Marxist dependency theory, economists such as Raúl Prebisch argued that multinational corporations perpetuated underdevelopment by extracting wealth and creating dependent economies. In other words, that they practiced imperialism.

Mexico nationalized U.S. oil companies in 1938. Guatemala pursued land reforms targeting United Fruit Company holdings in the early 1950s.

Newly independent African nations in the 1960s likewise viewed multinational corporations with suspicion, seeing them as extensions of colonial control. Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, for example, pursued policies to limit foreign corporate influence and emphasize economic self-sufficiency.

India developed one of the most comprehensive regulatory frameworks to control foreign multinationals, rooted in its commitment to socialist-inspired economic planning after independence in 1947. The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1973 and subsequent regulations required foreign firms to seek government approval for investments and often mandated majority Indian ownership.

India’s government prioritized domestic industrial development over foreign investment. The pharmaceutical sector became a deliberate flashpoint under the Indian Patent Act of 1970, which refused to recognize product patents for drugs, permitting only process patents, and enabled domestic firms to reverse-engineer medicines cheaply. India largely maintains this approach today.

By the late 1960s, developing nations coordinated their opposition through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Group of 77, advocating a “New International Economic Order” designed to regulate multinational corporations and give developing countries greater control over resources and development paths.

As Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, put it bluntly in his address to the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the Group of 77 in early 1979:

Each of our economies has developed as a by-product and a subsidiary of development in the industrialized North… The object is to complete the liberation of the Third World countries from external domination. That is the basic meaning of the New International Economic Order.

Developed Nations

But it wasn’t just the developing world that succumbed to the siren song of Marxist dependency theory. Advanced economies joined in as well.

Western European nations expressed deep anxiety about American corporate dominance. France under Charles de Gaulle was particularly vocal, viewing U.S. multinationals as threats to national sovereignty and culture. As French journalist and politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber wrote in his 1968 bestseller The American Challenge, “One by one, U.S. corporations capture those sectors of the economy most technologically advanced, most adaptable to change, and with the highest growth rates.”

Many Europeans used the same apocalyptic language we hear today: “seizure of power,” “invasion,” “domination,” “counterattack,” and “industrial helotry.”

Britain was more ambivalent—welcoming U.S. investment for jobs and technology while worrying about dependence. Labour governments in the 1960s occasionally blocked American acquisitions of British companies deemed strategically important. The government’s creation of International Computers Ltd (ICL) in 1968 was intended to provide independence from America’s IBM. It failed.

Italy developed strong Communist Party–led opposition to U.S. multinationals, viewing them as tools of American imperialism. Leftist parties and labor unions organized against major corporate presences in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the automobile sector, where Fiat dominated the domestic market while competing with American imports and subsidiaries.

Japan largely shut out U.S. advanced-technology firms during its postwar high-growth period and slightly beyond (roughly the 1950s through the mid-1980s). Through a combination of protectionist industrial policies, including restrictions on foreign direct investment and trade barriers, as well as the keiretsu system of cross-shareholding, Japanese firms secured market share in high-growth technology industries at home and abroad while denying foreign competitors access to the domestic market. South Korea followed a similar path.

Canada’s relationship with U.S. multinationals was complicated by geographic proximity and economic integration, but opposition intensified in the 1960s. The Gordon Commission (1955–57) raised alarms about the extent of American ownership of Canadian resources and enterprises, prompting public and political concern regarding economic sovereignty. Its conclusions eventually led to the Watkins Report in 1968, which was even more alarmist and recommended that Canada enact targeted policies to curb foreign control, including screening mechanisms for U.S. foreign investment.

Embracing these findings, the “Waffle” movement within Canada’s New Democratic Party pushed for the nationalization of key industries dominated by U.S. firms. As its founding manifesto declared:

The major threat to Canadian survival today is American control of the Canadian economy… American economic control operates throughout the formidable medium of the multi-national corporation.

From Global Free Trade to Regression

Much of this anti-American energy faded during the high-water mark of global free trade in the 1990s and early 2000s. Pursuing discriminatory policies became déclassé. No one wanted to admit they were protectionist.

But as China broke the global trade model in the late 2000s, and others followed suit, the non-discrimination super-ego weakened and the protectionist id took over. Long-term cooperation became overshadowed by short-term political gratification. Suddenly, attacking American corporations could once again be labeled “patriotic” and “pro-innovation.”

At the same time, bipartisan consensus in the United States around defending its multinational champions to preserve domestic economic power and prosperity collapsed. The progressive left and nationalist right alike turned on American firms, especially Big Tech, mirroring trends seen in governments worldwide.

The logic then became very, very simple: “If America is willing to denounce its own tech companies, why shouldn’t everyone else?”

Digital Sovereignty: Digital Protectionism With Better Branding

As a result, today’s anti-American aggression is focused on digital companies, the engines of modern innovation and growth. Just as in earlier eras, governments are increasingly using regulation to punish U.S. tech firms or to unfairly restrict their ability to gain market share, even when those firms invest locally and compete on the merits.

This is now packaged under the apple-pie–sounding banner of “digital sovereignty”—that is, digital protectionism. Egged on by domestic firms hiding behind the curtain and whispering into ministers’ ears to take down their competitors, policymakers chant, “We just want sovereignty!”

Fine. If you really want that, then build your own GPS system. Your own credit card network. Your own email platforms. Your own shipping industry. Your own PC ecosystem.

Waste billions replicating existing technologies. Burn your best engineers on symbolism. Make no real strategic impact whatsoever. I might argue that those resources would be better spent investing in R&D in critical sectors where you could scale and maybe even eventually lead, but what do I know? I’m just a silly American.

Canadian policymakers, backed by small domestic tech firms, are pushing to limit American AI and cloud providers. Korea wants a Euro-style Digital Markets Act designed to hobble large, mostly American, platforms in favor of domestic incumbents. And many governments now treat Big Tech as a convenient piggy bank for their nation’s most powerful special interests: telecoms in Korea, newspapers in Australia, cultural and media industries in Canada, and the public treasury in the EU.

Sovereignty Cuts Both Ways

To America’s many frenemies: While you’re at it, tell the United States not to bother saving you if you’re attacked militarily. Sovereignty cuts both ways. If you want independence from us, then I assume you’re okay with us being independent from you.

Canada, it’s time for American maple syrup sovereignty. Korea, we demand ginseng sovereignty.

To their credit, Congress and the Trump administration have begun to push back, making clear that access to the U.S. market is not unconditional. But they cannot let up.

Congress needs to hold more hearings, make more joint statements, and show more backbone. And the Trump administration must maintain its resolve: Countries that persist in attacks on America’s leading technology firms cannot expect full access to U.S. markets—no matter how earnestly they claim it is “just domestic policy” or a righteous stand against “tech oligarchs.”

Sure. And I’ve got a bridge I’d love to sell you.