A bill that reaches past Washington's borders
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has advanced the MATCH Act — the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware Act (H.R. 8170) — as part of what Chairman Brian Mast's committee called the "largest significant export control markup in the history of Congress." Mast framed the goal in blunt terms: "This bill would address one of the gravest issues we face today, by limiting China's access to the most critical machines and parts needed to make advanced chips" (House Foreign Affairs Committee).
The mechanism is what makes the bill unusual. Current US controls already bar ASML, the Dutch lithography monopolist, from selling its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems to China. The MATCH Act goes further: it would give the Netherlands and Japan 150 days to match US restrictions on deep ultraviolet (DUV) immersion lithography — the workhorse tool class ASML still legally sells to Chinese fabs — or face unilateral American enforcement through the Foreign Direct Product Rule, which lets Washington restrict any foreign-made tool that relies on US-origin software or components (TechWire Asia). Recent drafts go further still, extending the prohibition to servicing machines Chinese fabs already own.
The Hague pushes back
The Dutch government has not accepted this quietly. In a formal Kamerbrief responding to written parliamentary questions from MP Michiel Hoogeveen, Foreign Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma confirmed the cabinet's objections center on the bill's extraterritorial reach — a foreign legislature dictating Dutch export policy under threat of unilateral penalty (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal). The stakes for the Netherlands are not abstract: the same parliamentary document notes China accounted for 33% of ASML's 2025 revenue, a figure the company itself has already guided down toward roughly 20% in 2026 as export curbs bite regardless of the MATCH Act. Dutch officials have escalated the issue at head-of-government level, and the South China Morning Post reports the objection has been communicated directly to both Congress and the US executive branch, with Dutch officials explicit that alignment "must happen on a voluntary basis" rather than through cross-border coercion (SCMP).
Steelmanning the hawks
The case for closing the DUV gap is not frivolous. Immersion DUV, run with multipatterning, can print chips down to roughly 7nm — well past the "legacy" label often attached to it, and adequate for a wide swath of AI-relevant and military-relevant silicon. A servicing loophole is a real loophole: a machine that can't be resupplied with parts or software updates degrades, but one that receives full maintenance indefinitely is functionally a permanent export. And the alliance-alignment logic underlying the bill is sound in principle — a unilateral US-only ban is easily routed around if the Netherlands and Japan keep selling equivalent tools, which is precisely the loophole multilateral regimes like the Wassenaar Arrangement were designed to close.
Why coercion undercuts the goal
But a 150-day statutory ultimatum, backed by the threat of unilateral Foreign Direct Product Rule enforcement against a treaty ally, inverts the logic of multilateral controls. The entire premise of alliance-based export policy — the framework the US, Netherlands, and Japan have used since the 2023 trilateral DUV/EUV understanding — is that allies coordinate as sovereign equals with shared interests, not as vassals threatened with legal override if they don't move on Washington's clock. Legislating a deadline into US statute, rather than negotiating it diplomatically, tells The Hague and Tokyo that consultation was theater. That is corrosive to the coalition Washington needs for durable, jointly-enforced controls — and Sjoerdsma's objection is best read as a warning that goodwill, not just chip tools, is a finite resource.
The accelerant effect cuts the other way, too. China imported 95 DUV systems in 2025 alone, against domestic output plans of roughly five systems in 2026 and twenty in 2027 from the leading homegrown effort (TrendForce) — a gap measured in years, not months. A servicing ban that strands equipment already inside China gives Beijing's domestic toolmakers exactly the captive customer base and urgency they lack today. Export controls that are calibrated to actually starve a target of unattainable capability are proportionate; controls that mainly guarantee a subsidized home market for a nascent competitor are not — they trade a slower, coordinated chokehold for a faster, self-inflicted one.
The proportionate path
The honest test for any DUV restriction is whether it closes a capability gap China cannot otherwise fill, not whether it maximizes rhetorical toughness in a markup titled the "largest" in congressional history. Washington has leverage to bring allies further than they've gone — EUV controls already show that. But that leverage works best exercised through the same negotiated, multilateral channel that produced the 2023 alignment, not a statutory clock that treats a chip-toolmaking ally's sovereignty as a rounding error. If the MATCH Act passes in its current form, the most likely outcome is not a faster Chinese slowdown — it's a faster Chinese workaround, and a more brittle US-Dutch-Japanese coalition on everything that follows.