Trump tells the Dutch to go seize that tricky Chinese chip maker, and they do

With the plethora of news happening across the West – and indeed, across the world – you may have missed a seemingly small story out of the Netherlands this past week. Vincent Karremans, who has been the Dutch minister for economic affairs only since June, announced that he would be using a Cold War-era law – the Goods Availability Act – to seize control of Chinese-owned Nexperia, which manufactures crucial computer chips. In their official announcement, the government said it had seized the company “due to serious governance shortcomings” at Nexperia’s factory.

On the surface, it seems open-and-shut. Nexperia makes crucial chips, they were doing a poor job of it and threatening European supply chains at a time of great economic upheaval, so the Dutch seized the company.

Until one digs a little deeper. For starters, Nexperia was not doing particularly poorly before the seizure. If anything, stockholders were particularly happy with the company: Over the past six months, stocks had risen 26 per cent in value. The government acting now was also particularly odd, as there are nationwide elections in less than two weeks. The government – though it cannot be called much of a government anymore – holds only 32 seats out of 150 after multiple defections. In short, a deeply unpopular caretaker government seized control of a healthy company using a Cold War law built for moments of great national peril, such as armed conflict. Why would they have done so?

The answer came shortly, by way of leaks to the press: They did it at the behest of the Trump administration. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the Dutch government, in a June meeting, was told by a member of the Trump administration that it was “problematic” that the company was being led by a Chinese owner. The US was planning on blacklisting companies which could be seen as national-security risks and warned the Dutch that, absent action, Nexperia – which was owned by a Chinese company and therefore, indirectly, by the Chinese government – would be placed on the list.

Court documents later revealed that the Chinese CEO, Zhang Xuezheng, had been restructuring the company by transferring the power of the purse to individuals unaffiliated with the country and sending more than $100 million (€86 million) to mysterious Chinese entities.

China, of course, is furious about all of this, and has blocked the export of any of Nexperia’s products from leaving the country (the company had a major production site in China). It’s all, frankly, a mess – and it’s entirely the fault of European Union leadership.

Europe is currently between a rock and a hard place, the rock being the United States of America and the hard place being the People’s Republic of China. The issue is that they have placed themselves there. For decades, Europe sought to balance between the United States, Russia, and China: America would protect them, Russia would fuel them, China would produce their goods. Their people would have high taxes, but the benefits accrued would salve any anger over lower pay cheques.

This equilibrium began to break down once the multipolar world order came into being in the early 2020s, and has now fully snapped once America engaged in a nationalistic, America First foreign policy under the second Trump administration. But Europe, perpetually hoping that Trump would just go away, failed to prepare for his (re)arrival, and now finds themselves here.

The Dutch could not have afforded to say no to the Trump administration. Saying no would have caused a major Dutch company – though Chinese owned – to be blacklisted by the most powerful economy in the world. Saying yes was slightly less painful, but it’s already painful, as China is now effectively nullifying much of Nexperia’s ability to produce chips. Truth be told, American probably does not care all that much if Nexperia collapses – a company which is not sending money or trade secrets to China is better than one that is, even if the Dutch economy is a causality.

This latest happening is a microcosm of the result of a delayed acceptance of reality, but there are plenty more examples. The Baltic States recently were shocked to see the Trump administration request a spending cut to a Baltic defence programme. Now, the trio of small states are reduced to trying to convince individual members of the US Congress to keep the funding for 2026. Germany refused to consider real changes to Europe’s auto tariffs for years, and Brussels as a whole refused really to change their stance, even as Trump’s anger clearly increased over the past decade. That refusal resulted in a humiliating trade agreement which saw Europe drop all of their tariffs while America installed a near-universal 15 percent tariff on European goods. And the first Trump administration spent years trying to keep Europe from allowing Chinese-controlled Huawei to build critical 5G infrastructure but was only partially successful, due to Europe’s addiction to cheap Chinese goods.

The smart solution would have been to read the writing on the wall ten years ago and begin to decouple critical industries from China while building up their own defence networks in a substantial way. It was absolute madness for the Dutch government, or authorities in Brussels, to have allowed Nexperia to be purchased by a Chinese company – one partially owned by the government of China itself – in 2018. In 2002, this would have been foolish. But by 2018, when multipolarity was already beginning to rear its head, it was madness.

It’s better late than never, but the window for Europe to position itself strongly in the first part of the multipolar order is beginning to close. Geopolitical forecasters are likely getting ahead of their skis in terms of how long this era will last; the bipolar Cold War only lasted for forty years. But Europe will likely not want to wait until 2065 to have a chance to be top dog again. They should now, ten years after it was transparently obvious, do what’s necessary.