A minister walking two tightropes at once
On July 7-9, 2026, Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma led a delegation of 17 companies — including chip-equipment maker ASML — to Beijing and Shanghai, the first ministerial-level Dutch trade mission to China since 2018. Officially, the trip was about repairing a relationship strained by the Nexperia dispute, in which The Hague invoked emergency powers in late 2025 to block the Chinese-owned chipmaker's Dutch subsidiary from being stripped of assets, prompting Beijing to briefly halt Nexperia chip exports back to Europe (Rijksoverheid announcement). But the subtext was semiconductors, and specifically the question of who gets to decide the terms on which ASML sells lithography equipment to China.
Sjoerdsma's message to Chinese counterpart Wang Wentao was that Dutch export controls are not a US proxy war — they are, and will remain, "country-neutral." That is not spin. It is the Netherlands' actual legal framework: since September 1, 2023, exporters of advanced chipmaking equipment have needed a national license, assessed case by case on the basis of end-use and end-user rather than destination country, a policy the Dutch cabinet explicitly built to avoid looking like an extension of US sanctions (Rijksoverheid, June 2023). The regime was widened on September 7, 2024 to bring more deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography systems under the same licensing net, with then-minister Reinette Klever again stressing the country-neutral framing while citing "more security risks" in the current geopolitical environment (Rijksoverheid, September 2024).
The bill that would make neutrality irrelevant
The reason Sjoerdsma needed to defend that framing in Beijing is that it is under direct assault in Washington. The Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act — S.4281 and its House companion H.R.8170 in the 119th Congress — would ban ASML from selling or servicing certain DUV lithography tools in China outright, and would give the Netherlands and Japan 150 days to adopt equivalent controls of their own or face unilateral extension of the US Foreign Direct Product Rule to Dutch-made equipment. As Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology put it, that mechanism would "trigger the unilateral extraterritorial application of controls on those foreign tools" if allies fall short of the deadline (CSET, AI & Tech Brief). The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced the bill on April 22, 2026 alongside 19 other export-control measures, in what lawmakers called the largest export-control markup in congressional history (TechWireAsia).
Sjoerdsma had already taken this fight to Washington before flying to Beijing, without success. His objection, delivered in Dutch to reporters, gets at something more foundational than trade friction: "Exportcontrole werkt gewoon het beste als landen samenwerken uit overtuiging" — export control simply works best when countries cooperate out of conviction, not compulsion. On the extraterritorial threat itself: "Dat zien wij niet zitten. Samenwerking over de grenzen moet op vrijwillige basis" — we don't accept that; cross-border cooperation has to be voluntary (Reformatorisch Dagblad).
Steelmanning the case for MATCH
The bill's sponsors have a real argument, not just a protectionist reflex. Export controls only work if there are no gaps for an adversary to route around, and the Netherlands' own history gives Washington reason to worry about gaps: ASML kept servicing older, license-exempt DUV machines in China for years after the 2023 rules, and only tightened further under sustained US pressure. A determined buyer in China can, in principle, substitute a slightly older Dutch tool for a restricted one and still make meaningful progress on mature-node chips with military applications. If allied controls genuinely diverge, a US-only restriction just shifts revenue — and eventually manufacturing know-how — to Veldhoven and Tokyo instead of denying it to Beijing. That is a coherent case for alignment.
But coherence in the abstract does not survive contact with how the MATCH Act actually proposes to get alignment: not through negotiation, but through a 150-day countdown backed by the threat of extending US jurisdiction over a foreign company's foreign-made products sold to a third country. That is a difference in kind, not degree, from asking an ally to tighten its own rules. It converts the Netherlands from a sovereign regulator that Washington can persuade into a subject that Washington can simply overrule — and it does so against the one European country that has actually built a working, calibrated licensing regime, rather than against the many that have done far less.
Why coercion is the wrong tool here
The practical risk is that extraterritorial compulsion backfires on its own objective. The Nexperia episode already showed Beijing is willing to retaliate against Dutch industrial assets when it judges the Netherlands is acting under foreign direction rather than its own judgment; a MATCH Act that formalizes US veto power over Dutch licensing gives China every incentive to treat all future Dutch controls as American ones by proxy, eroding the very credibility of country-neutral review that makes it defensible in Beijing and enforceable at home. Coalition export control regimes — from CoCom in the Cold War to the current Wassenaar Arrangement — have historically worked through consensus-building and shared threat assessment, not statutory deadlines with jurisdictional teeth. If Washington wants Dutch and Japanese controls to converge with its own, the faster route is closer intelligence-sharing on end-use risk, not legislation that treats The Hague as a recalcitrant subsidiary. Sjoerdsma's dual pitch — hold the line as neutral in Beijing, resist coercion in Washington — is not indecision. It is the correct position for a country trying to keep an export-control regime that other allies might actually want to join.