the message they’ve sent the world is crystal clear: If Washington doesn’t like your nationality, your business in Europe is fair game.
This is absolutely wild. The Dutch government has just seized control of a major Chinese semiconductor company — and I’m not talking metaphorically. They’ve literally suspended the Chinese CEO, handed voting power to a non-Chinese director, and placed the company’s shares under the control of a third-party trustee. All justified under a wartime emergency law meant for things like bread and fuel rationing. Last I checked, the Netherlands wasn’t being invaded.
And this didn’t happen in a vacuum — it coincides perfectly with Trump’s new “50% rule,” which drags every subsidiary of a Chinese parent company onto America’s Entity List. It looks a lot like Europe is just following Washington’s lead yet again.
This move is disastrous on so many levels: it wrecks investor confidence in Europe (who’d risk billions knowing their assets could be seized overnight?), invites retaliation from China, and destabilizes one of Europe’s few successful chipmakers — Nexperia — a Dutch-based company with 14,000 employees.
Instead of standing up and saying “European companies operate under European law,” Europe folded. Once again proving it lacks strategic autonomy. A smarter move would’ve been to protect its own industries and show that Europe can make decisions for Europe.
But no — the message they’ve sent the world is crystal clear:
If Washington doesn’t like your nationality, your business in Europe is fair game.
posted by Satish Sharma at
06:09
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