Andrew Stuttaford: “Brussels’ and Beijing’s Useful Idiots: Lina Khan and the ‘Khanservatives’”

By Robert Bork Jr.

December 12, 2024

Andrew Stuttaford has a great piece in National Review today. He demonstrates the danger of outgoing Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan handing off the antitrust baton to “Khanservative” Republican enablers to cooperate with an anti-American, protectionist EU against America’s most competitive industries.

Stuttaford notes that former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and other EU leaders are deeply concerned about Europe lagging the United States in technology and innovation. The European solution? Not less regulation to liberate the entrepreneurial energies of young Europeans. They seek, instead, to inflict more regulation and antitrust persecution on American tech companies. Somehow, it is hoped, hobbling the United States will spur innovation in Europe.

This is reminiscent of the old saw about Russian peasants resenting their neighbors for owning a cow, instead of seeking to buy one of their calves. Stuttaford sees the EU’s Digital Markets Act as a strategy to expropriate some of U.S. big tech’s profits and free ride off its success. This is short-sighted in the extreme. The beneficiaries of this strategy will not be European tech firms. That cannot happen given the stultified environment of the EU. It can only be China that profits off Europe’s persecution of American companies.

Let us hope that the people President-elect Trump is appointing to trade and antitrust positions see it this way as well. We believe Donald Trump will agree: When Europe inflicts punishment on American businesses for simply being successful, the United States should retaliate.