The Atlantic rift is no longer a crack; it is a canyon. As of January 2026, the veneer of a "rules-based" global order has finally disintegrated, replaced by what can only be described as a financial "Wild West." Just as the previous era was defined by the raw exercise of military power as an extensive use of "bombing countries and seizing presidents" to maintain unilateral hegemony, the new era of 2026 is defined by the weaponization of the global financial stack.
The recent escalation of the trans-Atlantic trade war has revealed a brutal truth: In a hyper-connected world, true power is not just about how much money you have, but whose "pipes" you use to move it. For the European Union, the realization has been painful. As a member of the European Parliament, Raphael Glucksmann warned in his landmark Jan. 20, 2026, radio appearance, Europe has effectively become a "digital colony." Without control over its own payment infrastructure, the EU’s talk of "strategic autonomy" is little more than a "vacant lot" where American tech giants and regulators build their own fences.
To understand the depth of this cleavage, one must look past the diplomatic rhetoric and into the cold, hard data of economic extraction. The 2025 Insee report, "Economie et societe a l'ere du numerique" ("Economy and Society in the Digital Age"), provides a staggering autopsy of European financial dependency. In 2022 alone, French households conducted approximately 1 billion online transactions directed toward payment terminals located abroad. This represents a total of 54 billion euros ($64.67 billion) leaking out of the French economy in a single year, which is roughly 1,800 euros per household.
This is not merely a "market choice." It is a systemic funnel. The data shows that these imports are not coming from a diverse array of global partners. Instead, they are concentrated in a handful of "parking lots" for American hegemony: 19.5% of these digital imports transit through Luxembourg (the base for Amazon), while another 13% flow through Ireland, the European fortress for Meta and Google. Even more alarming for European regulators is that 50% of financial service imports now originate from just two hubs: Ireland and Lithuania.
This is the "Wild West" in action. The infrastructure of commerce has been designed to bypass national sovereignty, creating a direct "tax" on European consumption that feeds the coffers of the American "sheriffs" of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
The global perspective is equally sobering. According to the 2025 McKinsey Global Payments Report, the payments industry has evolved from a back-end utility into a $2.5 trillion revenue engine, processing a mind-boggling $2 quadrillion in value flows via 3.6 trillion transactions worldwide.
But this engine is no longer running on a single track. McKinsey notes a fundamental shift: the pursuit of "universal efficiency" has been replaced by a "competition among various market systems," each governed by its own philosophies and national security priorities. We have entered a "Mosaic World," which is defined by the fragmented landscape of regions with different standards, currencies and "trust anchors".
In this mosaic, the "financial bazooka" is the ultimate weapon. The global financial system is now heavily influenced by non-financial factors: tariffs, data governance rules and national security mandates. For the U.S., the dominance of the dollar and the Visa-Mastercard duopoly (which handled 19.7 billion transactions in France in 2023 alone, accounting for 21% of total EU card volume) is a tool for coercion. By threatening to "regulate access" to these terminals, Washington can effectively bomb a foreign economy without firing a single missile.
Europe’s response has been the launch of the European Payments Initiative (EPI) and its digital wallet, Wero, alongside the accelerated pilot phase of the Digital Euro. The goal is simple: to build a "sovereign rail" that does not rely on American intermediaries.
The data suggests the ground is shifting. While card payments reached 31.1 billion transactions in France in 2023, the number of transactions by virement (transfer) and prelevement (levy) has almost doubled since 2006, fuelled by the rise of instant transfers. Europe is betting on "Account-to-Account" (A2A) payments to bypass the American card networks.
However, as Glucksmann points out, building the pipes is only half the battle. If the underlying cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure) and the data governance rules remain in American hands, the Digital Euro will still be a guest in an American house. The cleavage is not just about the currency. It is about the "stack," which could be defined as the layers of code, hardware and law that allow a transaction to happen.
The EU-U.S. divide is a warning to the rest of the world. For countries like Türkiye, which has long championed a multipolar financial order through initiatives like the TROY card system, the 2026 Atlantic rift is a validation of "sovereign rails." The design choices being made today will determine who leads and who "falls behind" in the next decade. In this new Wild West, neutrality is an illusion. You are either a builder of your own rails or you are a passenger on someone else’s, subject to their tariffs, their sanctions and their whims.
The 54 billion that leave France every year for Luxembourg and Ireland are a "digital tribute" paid to an empire that no longer respects the rules of the game. For the Global South and middle powers, the message is undeniable. Sovereignty is not a flag. It is a payment terminal. If you don't own the code, you don't own the country.
