Why the US Sanctioning a UAE Bank Should Drive your IT Decisions
This article is not meant to be political but we should consider the context here. The Gulf Countries which were said to be one of the best US allies in this year have gone from being treated well by the US to the point we are at now, where the US has even sanctioned a UAE based bank and threatened to attack others. I view this as the same scope of how we talk about the US seizing domains, servers and cutting off technology grounds for nearly any reason. The old view that “we are not Iran and we’re an ally of the US so we’re safe” is now a dangerous and outdated belief. Just take another great ally of the US, like Canada, who is being treated the same as an enemy of the US and has been threatened by invasion and takeover by the US. For now, the US has focused on Canada by waging economic warfare via tariffs and Canada’s energy supplies have also been threatened. If this can also happen to Canada, no country is off limits for any product or service that the US offers or controls.
CAIRO, Aug 29 (Reuters) – Egypt’s Banque Misr said on Saturday it was reviewing a U.S. Treasury notice to cut off its UAE branches from dollar transactions over their dealings with Iran, while the UAE central bank said it had launched an urgent examination of the branches following the U.S. action.
What we can derive from this latest action is that using US based IT products or services is always conditional, there is no such thing as being a “great ally of the US”, where you should operate thinking that you will continue to have access to particular US IT hardware, services or other systems, including the internet. This is going to continue to be important moving forward for the IT world. Imagine many pieces of Cloud based hardware like Cisco Meraki and other systems you do not truly own or control, you could be cut off overnight. The US started by cutting even Hong Kong off ChatGPT and has arrested people for providing things like Nvidia GPUs banned in China. But we all know that it could any product, service or country that is targeted next by US actions.
The key takeaway here is that if your company relies on US companies, products and services, you should look for a non-US controlled service provider that is not vulnerable to being shut down by the US as your company could be impacted at any time and we’re not even addressing the cybersecurity issues of dealing with US services. This means using non-US companies for your IT services, in jurisdictions that are not going to comply with the US.
