A visit that was both handshake and objection
On June 24-25, 2026, Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma flew to Washington to do two things that sit uneasily together. He met US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to argue against the MATCH Act, the bill that would let Washington unilaterally impose export controls on ASML's deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography sales and servicing to China if the Netherlands doesn't match US restrictions within 150 days. And, during the same trip, the Netherlands formalized its membership in Pax Silica, the US State Department's supply-chain alliance for AI and semiconductor inputs that it joined on June 23, alongside Japan, South Korea, and others (Global Banking & Finance; Bits&Chips).
That juxtaposition is the story. The Dutch government is not resisting cooperation with the United States on chip security — it is resisting being told, by statute, that it no longer gets a vote. "It's exceptional that I'm coming here to broadly outline our concerns to Congress," Sjoerdsma said of the visit, adding that "the stakes for the Netherlands may be very high" (Taipei Times). Asked directly about the tension between voluntary alignment and legislative compulsion, he was blunter still: "We want to prevent sensitive technology from ending up where it could harm our security. But that is something that must happen on a voluntary basis" (Taipei Times, ibid.).
What the MATCH Act actually does
Introduced April 2, 2026 as H.R. 8170 and S. 4281, the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware Act cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee 44-0 on April 22 as part of what lawmakers called the largest single markup of export-control legislation in congressional history. Its mechanism is straightforward and severe: the bill gives allied toolmaking nations — principally the Netherlands (home to ASML) and Japan (home to Tokyo Electron) — 150 days to adopt country-wide controls equivalent to America's own. If Commerce determines they haven't, the bill directs the Bureau of Industry and Security to extend US jurisdiction over the allied equipment anyway, on the theory that it still contains US-origin technology.
The Dutch cabinet's own account of the bill, filed in response to parliamentary questions from MP Michiel Hoogeveen, does not soften this. The government's formal reply states plainly: "The cabinet opposes extraterritorial effect emanating from the American proposal. Each country is responsible for its own export control legislation" (Tweede Kamer). The same document flags a specific commercial threat beyond new sales: that the bill "can lead to businesses, also for already delivered machines, being prohibited from performing maintenance or support without a license" — meaning ASML could be barred from servicing DUV systems it sold years ago, a retroactive bite that goes well beyond blocking future exports.
The steelman: this is a real loophole, not manufactured urgency
The bill's sponsors have a genuine grievance, and it deserves to be stated on its own terms before it's contested. US-origin export controls on Chinese chipmakers have real teeth only if allied suppliers close ranks; a Chinese fab locked out of American tools can still buy ASML's older-generation immersion DUV systems, which — while a decade behind the cutting edge — remain sufficient to produce the mature-node chips that feed China's military and surveillance supply chains at volume. Divergent national control lists have historically let Beijing route around the tightest link in the chain by shopping the loosest one. The Wassenaar Arrangement, the closest thing the world has to a multilateral export-control consensus, took roughly three years to negotiate — Congress's 150-day clock is a signal of impatience with a genuinely slow-moving diplomatic process, not a groundless deadline invented for its own sake.
Why the remedy still misfires
But the MATCH Act answers a coordination problem with a coercion tool, and that trade-off is the wrong one. The Netherlands is not a reluctant partner: it tightened its own dual-use rules in 2023 and again in 2025, restricting ASML's most advanced immersion and EUV systems well before Washington demanded it, and it just signed onto Pax Silica specifically to deepen allied coordination on chip supply chains. A country that voluntarily joins the coalition on Monday and gets threatened with unilateral jurisdiction over its flagship company on Tuesday has little incentive to keep leading with cooperation next time — the lesson MATCH teaches allies is that goodwill gets you the same outcome as resistance, so resistance costs nothing.
The commercial stakes explain the intensity of the pushback. China accounted for roughly 33% of ASML's total net sales in 2025; the company itself projects that share falling to about 20% in 2026 as Chinese buyers front-load purchases ahead of tighter rules (CNBC). A full servicing ban on already-delivered machines — the specific fear raised in the Dutch parliament's questions — would hit not just future bookings but existing contracts, inviting exactly the kind of legal and commercial disruption that undermines confidence in the US as a predictable trading partner for the very allies whose cooperation the bill depends on.
The better path is the one already underway
Pax Silica is the model MATCH should have followed: a coalition built on consent, not a deadline enforced by statute. If the strategic goal is genuinely to close the allied-gap loophole — not to punish the Netherlands or claim jurisdictional credit — Congress should let Commerce negotiate country-wide alignment through the same channels producing results already, backed by the diplomatic leverage the administration clearly still has, rather than legislating a fuse that runs out whether or not the negotiation is working. The Dutch government has shown for three years running that it will tighten controls when the security case is made. A bill that treats that record as insufficient, and threatens to seize control of a foreign company's export licensing by default, spends alliance capital that took over a decade to build.