In Vienna, Christine Lagarde placed Europe at a crossroads that civilizations have faced before: the slow surrender of autonomy through dependency, or the harder work of self-determination. The European Central Bank president warned that AI — now threading itself into borders, hospitals, banks, and tax systems — is becoming the infrastructure of sovereignty itself, and Europe controls almost none of it. With the US holding 75 percent of global AI computing capacity and Europe just 5 percent, the continent risks handing its trade partners a lever over economic life that no power in history has