I do not know how to sleep these days Peter Wennink, ASML Holding NV, head of the largest technology company in Europe. Because he's in the eye of the hurricane, if there's anyone. And the storm has no way to relax. The other way around.

Dutch ASML is one of the key suppliers of machinery for the semiconductor industry worldwide. It is one of the main producers of lithographic systems for the manufacture of microchips and the most advanced in its highest range. A company that completely conditions the development of its crucial sector. Besides being a company that gives fat profits without making mistakes. I mean, one of the ones we would like to have in us.

But I don't know if I'd like it right now to be on the skin of ASML's CEO Wennink. It is precisely because it does what it does, because the Dutch ASML (euphemism – decoupling, derisking… – and the perifrasis have escaped amid the guns of economic war between the major powers of the world, and inscription in things, I think it anticipates work). Similar.

The United States has been trying for years to bring short-circuiting to the progress of China's high-tech. Excuses have been changing (they anticipate espionage; they use work to violate human rights; they strengthen their army; they are imposing communism), but it is one and only decision: we cannot allow them to move forward.

The semiconductors sector is, at the moment, the fashionable conflict. And ASML, stuck in the middle. Even though EE.UU. The Dutch Government has since September marked the same bans for the most advanced products. Wenninke did not intend to give in completely, and announced two months ago his intention to continue selling less leading products.

However, at the end of June, the other cheek gets a slap: The People ' s National Assembly of China has adopted, with relative confidentiality, or at least in its turn, the Foreign Relations Act, which enters into force on 1 July. A couple of articles allow China to impose internal regime sanctions on those who, without sufficient cause or international legislation, impose measures, sanctions, etc. against Chinese interests. This is ASML.

It seems that capitalism is a system that can find a solution to each obstacle, so some have started to offer something like this.