As Washington tightens the chip war with China, Europe has for the first time said out loud that it won't stay silent. Dutch trade minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma traveled to Washington this week to meet the US trade secretary and members of Congress, with one goal - to stop the proposed MATCH Act, which would bar Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western equipment.

Why is the Netherlands of all countries raising its voice? Because the blow falls directly on ASML - the Dutch company that's the most valuable in all of Europe and the only one in the world that makes the sophisticated lithography machines used to produce the most advanced AI chips. When a single country has the only factory for the most important tool of the digital age, then someone else's laws suddenly become your problem.

„It's extraordinary that I'm coming here to lay out our concerns before Congress", Sjoerdsma said. „The stakes for the Netherlands may be very high." And they are - China accounts for 19 percent of ASML's system sales. The law would go beyond the current restrictions and cover even the less advanced machines, not just the most advanced ones that have been banned for China for years anyway.

The proposal, introduced in April, hasn't yet passed a vote in Congress and will probably need to be nested into some larger package to pass. But the very fact that a European minister flies across the ocean to defend his own company from an American law says everything about where the real power has shifted - to the machines that make the chips.

For a reader in the Balkans, this isn't a distant story. When the two biggest players fight for technological supremacy, small economies end up on the margins of other people's decisions - they buy expensive, get served last, and have no say in the rules. Europe at least has one trump card on the table. The question is whether it will use it to secure itself a seat, or just to survive one more round.