A Dutch minister's Washington trip, with Seoul watching from the sidelines
On June 24, 2026, Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma sat down with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to make the case against the MATCH Act — the second such trip by a Dutch cabinet member in as many months. His message, as reported by TechCrunch, was blunt: "It's exceptional that I'm coming here to broadly outline our concerns to Congress. The stakes for the Netherlands may be very high."
The bill he was lobbying against — the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware Act, introduced by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA) on April 2, 2026 and advanced by the House Foreign Affairs Committee three weeks later — targets ASML, the Dutch company that makes nearly all of the world's advanced chipmaking lithography tools. But the companies with the most to lose from a US-Dutch standoff aren't Dutch or American. They're South Korean.
Why the bill exists — and why it isn't unreasonable on its face
The MATCH Act's premise deserves a fair hearing. Current US export controls bar ASML's newest extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) machines from China, but older deep-ultraviolet (DUV) immersion tools — good enough to print mature-node memory and logic — still ship there, along with the maintenance contracts that keep installed machines running. Washington's argument, laid out by sponsors including Sens. Jim Risch, Pete Ricketts and Andy Kim in introducing the Senate companion (S.4281), is that allied gaps undercut US controls: if China can still buy DUV tools and get them serviced from the Netherlands or Japan, unilateral American restrictions on US-made equipment accomplish little. Closing that gap through binding legislation, rather than case-by-case diplomacy, is a defensible response to years of allies moving at different speeds.
Where it overreaches
The problem is how the MATCH Act proposes to close the gap: by asserting US jurisdiction over what a Dutch company may sell and service, regardless of Dutch export law. Per Taipei Times, the machines at stake represent roughly a fifth of ASML's expected annual revenue — money the bill would let Washington intercept without the Dutch government's consent. Sjoerdsma's objection isn't that the controls are unwarranted; it's that Congress is trying to legislate them into Dutch domestic law from outside. That's a meaningfully different — and more corrosive — move than sanctions or licensing conditions aimed at Chinese end users.
South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix sit directly in the blast radius, despite having no seat at this negotiating table. Both companies already operate under a tightened US licensing regime: the Bureau of Industry and Security revoked the blanket Validated End-User authorizations that had let their China fabs — Samsung's NAND plant in Xi'an, SK Hynix's DRAM fab in Wuxi and NAND site in Dalian — import US-origin tools license-free. Under the rule Commerce finalized last year, former VEU participants had 120 days after publication to secure individual export licenses, and BIS has said it will approve renewals to keep existing fabs running but not to expand or upgrade them (BIS). That's already a one-fab-at-a-time leash on Seoul's memory giants. The MATCH Act adds a second one: if ASML can no longer service DUV tools already installed at Xi'an or Wuxi, Samsung and SK Hynix lose maintenance on machines they've already paid for and depend on for current output — a decision made entirely in Washington and The Hague, about equipment sitting on Korean-owned factory floors.
The alliance-management irony
This lands awkwardly given where Seoul has actually chosen to align. South Korea joined the US-led Pax Silica coalition — alongside the Netherlands, Japan, the UK, Australia, Singapore, Israel and the UAE — when it was founded in Washington on December 11, 2025, explicitly to coordinate chip and AI supply chains away from China dependence (Real Instituto Elcano). Having signed onto that cooperative framework, Korean firms now find a second US bill threatening to override the terms of their own equipment servicing through a jurisdictional claim over a third country's exports — not through negotiation with Seoul, but through Congress overriding The Hague.
The proportionate path
Pax Silica is the better model precisely because it's negotiated, not imposed: member governments opted in, retaining a say over their own companies. The MATCH Act's extraterritorial mechanism throws that away in favor of unilateral leverage, and DutchNews.nl reports the Netherlands signed the Pax Silica declaration the same week Sjoerdsma was in Washington fighting the bill — cooperating on the multilateral track while resisting the coercive one. Congress should take the distinction seriously. If the goal is genuinely to align allies, alignment secured by threatening a partner's flagship exporter — with Samsung and SK Hynix's China output as unconsulted collateral — is a strange way to keep that partner, or the next one, at the table.