When we drain the ocean and praise the puddles

Swedish and European IT is caught in a paradox. We stand before the greatest infrastructure humanity has ever built. Oceans of compute, storage, and security. Platforms hardened by global investments. Built with resilience no single EU state could dream of and with protections no local provider can match.

And yet, in fear and misplaced pride, we drain the ocean.

We say we are afraid of foreign leaders. We imagine Washington or Beijing peering into our data. We declare the deep water unsafe because it does not fly the Swedish flag or the EU flag. So we let it run out. What remains are puddles. Small, muddy, fragile puddles run by local providers with a fraction of the capacity, limited security budgets, and no global safety nets.

And here lies the bitter truth. By fearing outside powers, we weaken ourselves far more than they ever could. We exchange oceans of resilience for puddles of dependency. We create the very vulnerability we claim to defend against.

The real enemy is not out there. The real enemy sits in our own policies, our own boards, our own refusal to trust scale. By draining the ocean, we do the work of foreign leaders for them. We dismantle our own strength and call it sovereignty.

Still we pretend. We tell ourselves that mud is stability. That shallow water is control. That fragile pools can defend us better than the ocean itself.

But we know this is not true. We give up world-class protections for something smaller and weaker. We sacrifice innovation for a false sense of independence. We reduce choice, resilience, and security and call it strategy.

Puddles dry up. Puddles freeze overnight. Puddles collapse under their own weight. The ocean remains. Wave after wave of security, redundancy, and strength.

Draining the ocean and applauding the puddles is not sovereignty. It is surrender disguised as control.

True resilience does not come from hiding in the mud. It comes from learning to navigate the ocean and using its depth to our advantage.

Otherwise Sweden and the EU will be stranded in the puddle, cheering the mud while the tide rolls on without us.