The Empty Chairs in Paris
When Emmanuel Macron opened the International Space Summit in Paris on September 9, 2026, four of the companies that define modern commercial spaceflight — SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, and Starcloud — were not in the room. They had pulled out days earlier, after Charles Powell, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's assistant director for space and spectrum, told executives on an August 27 call that attending could make them look like a "prop to support policies counter to U.S. interests," according to reporting cited by Defense One. The White House also accused Paris of organizing the summit without consulting Washington and of pursuing "anti-competitive practices." Officials declined to confirm Powell's remarks on the record, offering only that the administration "continues to collaborate with allies" in space.
The irony, as Secure World Foundation's Victoria Samson told Defense One, is that U.S. government agencies attended anyway, alongside roughly 120 other countries. Macron used the stage to make the opposite point Washington was trying to suppress: "Europe is taking its destiny into its own hands, including in space," he said, calling for a "powerful Europe, independent even in space," per Fortune.
The Case Europe Makes For Itself
Before dismissing that as reflexive anti-Americanism, it's worth taking Europe's argument seriously. Roughly two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit now belong to a single private company, Starlink — a concentration that didn't exist five years ago and that leaves European governments, telecoms, and militaries dependent on infrastructure controlled by one foreign firm's commercial and political judgment. That dependency became concrete, not theoretical, after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine exposed how much battlefield connectivity could hinge on one company's decisions. A bloc that cannot guarantee its own emergency communications, maritime surveillance, or military backhaul without a single American vendor has a legitimate sovereignty problem, not a manufactured one. IRIS², the EU's answer, is a 348-satellite constellation — 66 more than originally planned — with first launches targeted for 2029, per Engadget. Building a redundant, EU-controlled alternative for government traffic is a defensible hedge, not protectionism by itself.
Where the Policy Turns Protectionist
The EU Space Act, proposed by the Commission on June 25, 2025 as COM(2025) 335 and now under review in Parliament with rapporteur Elena Donazzan's draft report from March 3, 2026, is where the sovereignty argument starts shading into something else. The regulation explicitly reaches "space services providers established in the Union, and outside the Union when such services or space-based data are provided in the Union," per the European Parliament's legislative tracker — a GDPR-style long-arm mechanism built, transparently, with Starlink's market position in mind. Layered on top is the spectrum fight: ARCEP, France's telecoms regulator, opened a public consultation on July 20, 2026 on extending L-band mobile-satellite-service authorizations ahead of a planned reattribution aligned to November 2030, according to ARCEP's own consultation page. That timeline sits conveniently close to when IRIS² and national constellations need spectrum room of their own.
None of this is illegal, and regulators are entitled to manage scarce spectrum and set safety standards for a sector with real debris and collision risks. But a rule that is formally neutral while being designed around one competitor's market share is industrial policy wearing a safety regulation's clothes. If Brussels wants European champions, it should fund them directly and let them compete on service quality — not write licensing and spectrum rules whose main effect is raising the cost of the incumbent it can't yet out-build.
The Real Cost of a Trade War in Orbit
Washington's response made this worse, not better. Pressuring private companies to boycott a summit that 120 other governments attended doesn't slow the EU Space Act by a single day — Donazzan's committee process runs on its own clock regardless of who shows up in Paris. What it does is hand European sovereignty hawks a gift: proof that dependence on American space infrastructure comes bundled with American political leverage. Every time Washington treats commercial space diplomacy as a loyalty test, it makes the case for IRIS² stronger, not weaker, and makes it easier for Donazzan's colleagues to wave through long-arm jurisdiction provisions as simple self-defense.
The better path for both sides is the boring one: let the EU build IRIS² for the government market it's actually worried about, let ARCEP run its spectrum consultation on its published merits through September 30, 2026, and let Starlink keep competing for commercial customers on price and coverage. Sovereignty concerns are real; so is the cost of letting trade-war instincts — on either side of the Atlantic — decide who gets to show up in a conference room.