The French government said this year that it would replace Zoom and other American videoconference software with a French-developed alternative. Germany is building a homegrown platform for artificial intelligence. Companies in both countries are teaming up to build A.I. chips to rival those of the United States and China.

These are modest steps in Europe’s high-stakes race to catch up to America and China in the global sprint for digital independence. Without it, Europe’s political and business leaders worry, they will be vulnerable to sudden losses of access to critical technologies, as after President Trump’s recent decision to cut off foreigners from some of Anthropic’s latest artificial intelligence models. They will also miss out on revenues from a booming industry.

Yet interviews with industry leaders, public officials, entrepreneurs and economists suggest there is currently little question about whether Europe can wean itself off tech dependence anytime soon.

It cannot.

Instead, political and business leaders across the continent are wrestling with a more limited, but still daunting, question. If full independence is impossible, where should Europe focus its digital efforts, in pursuit of at least partial autonomy?

“One hundred percent autonomy in digital services is not at this stage something that is feasible,” said Anne Le Hénanff, France’s minister for artificial intelligence and digital affairs. “We just need to decide what we don’t want to be dependent on.”

Europe’s consumers and businesses rely heavily on American and Chinese imports for their digital lives, including social media, national security systems and artificial intelligence. They store data with American companies, like Amazon, despite European concerns over the comparative laxness of American data protection rules. European-based multinational companies, like Mercedes-Benz, hone some of their most important new technology in Chinese labs.

Europe has one homegrown large language model, Mistral A.I., a three-year-old start-up that is France’s national champion in artificial intelligence and is now valued at $14 billion. Mistral’s three founders worked for Google and Meta before starting the company.

Technology executives acknowledge that France does not yet have a financing culture, like that of Silicon Valley, to incubate promising start-ups. In France and across much of Europe, business leaders complain that companies must move to America to scale up.

Continental leaders have begun to call that reliance dangerous, strategically and economically, as Washington and Beijing more boldly wield raw power to bend other countries to their will. They say it leaves them more vulnerable to cyberattacks, and to economic and diplomatic pressure by powerful governments that may not share Europe’s democratic values.

“We need nothing more and nothing less than technological sovereignty in Europe, and therefore also in Germany, at least wherever it is attainable,” Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said last fall. Europe’s technological dependencies, he warned, were “being exploited for power politics.”

Last week, the Netherlands announced plans to create government-controlled data centers to prevent sensitive information from falling into the hands of foreign companies.

Last month, France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said his country’s domestic intelligence service would stop using A.I. data tools from Palantir, an American tech company, in favor of those from a French company, ChapsVision.

“Just as we would not agree to transfer our national archives to California, we must use our own A.I. tools,” Mr. Lecornu said in a video posted on social media.

Relying on foreign technology can be dangerous for the private sector, too. Many European companies depend on Chinese products for data storage and cannot guarantee that their data will not be shared with Chinese intelligence, said Sebastian Kurz, a former chancellor of Austria. He is now the president of Dream, a company that sells A.I. security systems that exist entirely within one country to Western clients, including governments.

That dependence, Mr. Kurz said in an interview, is problematic if it affects “sensitive data in sectors like health care, where people feel a need that their data is protected.”

Governments across Europe are spending billions of euros to try to shake those dependencies for themselves and their companies — at least in select areas.

The French government has committed to spending roughly $5.3 billion to buy digital tools from French companies.

The German government plans to spend more than $20 billion over the next several years in six key tech sectors, including artificial intelligence and biotechnology. It has contracted with the German companies Deutsche Telekom and SAP to build a government A.I. platform that can be entirely disconnected from rivals like China and America.

A German government agency for innovation has started a fund worth roughly $140 million to catalyze investment in European start-up companies in areas like A.I. At a conference the agency sponsored this spring, officials said they were hoping less to fully supplant American and Chinese tech companies than to work with them — and to become indispensable in their operations.

Dorothee Bär, Germany’s federal minister for research, technology and space, noted in an interview at the conference that German start-ups had played a role in the launch of NASA’s Artemis II rocket.

“These mutual dependencies are also important, and the Americans in particular see that we have our own strengths,” Ms. Bär said. America in the Trump era, she added, “reacts exclusively to strength.”

German tech leaders are particularly enthusiastic about their chances of building on the country’s legacy strength, manufacturing, to pioneer exportable high-tech products like advanced versions of toolmaking equipment for factories.

“There are certain areas where Europe has an edge, actually,” said Antonio Krüger, the chief executive of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. “This is an asset that I think the U.S. and China currently don’t have at that level of quality and amount.”

Europe’s technological strengths also include basic research, said Anne Bouverot, a chairwoman of a government committee for generative artificial intelligence. She pointed to a collaboration between the Fraunhofer labs in Germany and the French research lab CEA in developing next-generation chips for A.I.

Europe, however, remains weak in generating capital to fund tech companies as they grow larger, Ms. Bouverot said. Mistral raised $1.5 billion by selling a stake to a Dutch company. But that remains an exceptional case.

“We need to be able to finance start-ups better in Europe,” Ms. Bouverot said. “There’s lots of savings in Europe. Today, those savings are not used enough for start-ups. They either go to the U.S. or they stay in nonrisky investments.”

Ms. Bouverot said Europe would never cast itself off completely from Silicon Valley. She said the idea was for European countries to carve out autonomy in strategic digital areas — making them less vulnerable, for example, to an interruption of service or a breach of sensitive data.

That’s very different from the full vision of digital independence some leaders are promising. And it is not enough for those who say that Europe needs to break free of America and China for a purely economic reason — to profit from the next wave of booming technology sales.

“The whole point of sovereignty for me is not security and resilience,” said Cristina Caffarra, chair of the EuroStack Initiative Foundation, which works to strengthen Europe’s digital industries.

“It’s not democracy and all that,” she said. “It’s value capture.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.

Nine years ago, President Emmanuel Macron of France invited President Trump to a military parade on Bastille Day to cozy up to the man who guaranteed Europe’s security. On Tuesday, Mr. Macron gathered two dozen leaders at this year’s parade to symbolize Europe’s resolve to cut itself loose from him.

Not simply a display of French military might, the parade also featured nearly 500 troops from 35 other countries that are members of the coalition of the willing — a multinational force, led by France and Britain, that is meant to secure Ukraine after any potential cease-fire with Russia.

If Mr. Macron’s appeal to Mr. Trump in 2017 was only partly successful, his bid to break from the United States is similarly incomplete.

Europe’s robust show of support for Ukraine, showcased in the parade, has been offset by its powerlessness in face of renewed hostilities between the United States and Iran. Its monthslong promise to send a European maritime security force to the Strait of Hormuz, to reopen the strait and guarantee the free passage of commercial traffic, never began and now seems more a hostage to events than ever.

For Europe, the Strait of Hormuz mission has been “a bit of a litmus test” of its ability to defend its interests, said Jeremy Shapiro, a director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research group with offices in London and Berlin. “Although there has been some talk about that,” he said, “it has not gotten far.”

Those doubts were pushed aside on Tuesday by a Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Élysées, the grandest avenue in Paris, that was meant to demonstrate Europe’s evolving independence.

Mr. Macron was flanked by leaders including President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain. They watched as warplanes from European countries including Britain, Denmark and Germany streaked across the azure skies above Paris alongside French fighter jets, two of which were piloted by Ukrainian aviators.

The day before, the leaders had convened in Paris to cement planning for the coalition of the willing. A resolute-looking Mr. Macron called the summit evidence of Europe’s “strategic reawakening.”

Yet it was another conflict, 3,000 miles from Paris in the Middle East, that revealed the dents in Europe’s armor, according to analysts.

On Monday, with a cease-fire between the United States and Iran in tatters, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would impose a 20 percent fee on cargo shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, to pay for its protection of the waterway.

That directly contradicts the purpose of the European mission in the strait — to preserve freedom of navigation — and puts European leaders back at odds with Mr. Trump, after a period in which they believed he had moved toward them on Ukraine. It is not clear what they can do about it.

“He can plausibly threaten that because Europeans need the strait more than Americans, and so he can effectively run a protection racket, as he has tried to in European security,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It doesn’t speak well for their ability to follow through on the European security aspects of greater autonomy.”

To be sure, France and Britain have made extensive plans to deploy a flotilla of frigates and demining ships to help guide cargo ships through the strait. More than 20 countries have enlisted, though some, like Germany, will require parliamentary approval before they can commit military assets.

Still, Europe’s leaders said from the start that they would deploy ships only if the United States and Iran agreed to a durable cease-fire. That seemed far-fetched on Tuesday, after days of strikes and Mr. Trump’s reinstatement of a naval blockade.

While the American president has been open to Europe’s mission, he has never lent it much credence, complaining instead about the refusal of America’s allies to join the American-Israeli military campaign against Iran. Mr. Trump said the United States could secure the strait by itself in a deal with Iran.

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have a ship or two up here from a few countries,” he said to Mr. Macron at a Group of 7 summit last in month in Évian-les-Bains, France. “You’d be a great country to do it.”

Europe has made more progress in compensating for the reduction of American military aid to Ukraine. Though Mr. Trump agreed last week to issue licenses to Ukraine to manufacture Patriot antimissile systems, he has repeatedly cast doubt on his willingness to support Ukraine’s long-term security.

Attempting to fill that void, eight European leaders, including Mr. Macron, announced an antiballistic missile coalition on Monday that is designed to enable Ukraine to develop a homegrown air-defense industry to repel Russian attacks. France and eight other European countries have pledged to supply Ukraine with parts and technological expertise.

On Monday, Mr. Macron left it to Mr. Starmer to address the deteriorating situation in the Strait of Hormuz. He reaffirmed Europe’s readiness to deploy a force. But as Europe confronts a volatile Middle East, an erratic United States and a predatory Russia, its relevance is undermined by its own shifting cast of leaders.

Mr. Starmer, who has been centrally involved Europe’s efforts to muster the coalition of the willing and the maritime security force, is expected to vacate 10 Downing Street in less than a week. His presumptive successor, Andy Burnham, is not nearly as well known on the global stage.

Mr. Macron, who has spearheaded Europe’s drive for strategic autonomy, is also time-limited. This was his final Bastille Day parade as president; next May, he will step down after 10 years. It is far from clear whether France’s next president will be as fervent a proponent of Europe’s rearmament as he has been.

Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is less than halfway through his second term, which suggests that he will continue to set the agenda on war and peace.

When Mr. Macron invited Mr. Trump to his first parade in 2017, his guest was so dazzled that he got the idea to stage his own parade in Washington, something he did eight years later.

“It was military might,” the American president said later, “and I think a tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France.”

“We’re going to have to try and top it,” he added.

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.