Washington's latest anti-China alliance seeks to control the materials, technologies, and trust networks of the AI age by reshaping supply chains into political weapons
The Cradle
So declared US Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, Jacob Helberg, as part of the State Department’s announcement of Pax Silica, the new flagship initiative for artificial intelligence (AI) and supply chain security.
With this declaration, Washington is drawing a new iron curtain across global economic infrastructure – one forged in rare metals, cutting-edge chips, and digital infrastructure, and justified through the familiar language of trust, security, and prosperity. In short, Pax Silica is a non-binding declaration of intent to form a political-economic alliance in the field of AI and its supply chains, primarily directed against China, and includes seven countries, among them Israel.
What is Pax Silica?
According to the announcement earlier this month, Project Pax Silica is the State Department's latest effort in the field of AI and supply chain security: “We believe that true economic security requires reducing excessive dependencies and forging new connections with reliable partners and suppliers committed to fair market practices.”
At its core, the alliance aims to dominate the AI economy by tightly controlling the supply chains that underpin it – from raw materials and shipping lanes to data flows and chip manufacturing. Ostensibly framed around “economic security” and “trusted partnerships,” the initiative serves as a geopolitical instrument to isolate China and cement western supremacy in the industries of the future.
Despite its Latin branding (Pax meaning peace and stability, while Silica refers to the world of technology and computer chips, alluding to Silicon Valley), Pax Silica is the economic architecture of a new Cold War. The declaration was signed at the Pax Silica Summit in Washington on 12 December, and the selection of member states – Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, the UK, Israel, the UAE, and Australia – mirrors the containment coalitions of previous eras.
Guest contributions from Taiwan, the EU, Canada, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) further reinforce the Atlanticist orientation of this emerging bloc. Partners in the Persian Gulf and NATO member Turkiye are also obvious contenders to join, especially given the latter’s “deep industrial capacity and proximity to European markets.”
Trust as a weapon
Pax Silica functions less as an agreement and more as a framework for political consolidation. Its real purpose is to establish a shared lexicon of risks and priorities in the AI economy – a kind of ideological supply chain. When countries unify their definitions of what constitutes a “risk,” a “sensitive technology,” or a “trusted partner,” they embed exclusion into policy.
Washington grasps this strategy well. The initiative clears a path for treating computing power, chips, and rare metals as strategic assets – tools of influence rather than neutral market goods. This opens space for governments to override market dynamics in favor of political allegiance.
Through tighter controls on investments, infrastructure expansion under approved networks, and incentives for compliant industries, Washington seeks to hardwire political allegiance into the circuitry of the AI economy. Economic resilience, under this arrangement, no longer refers to market strength, but to loyalty to a strategic order.
From commodity to leverage
Pax Silica signals a decisive shift away from open global markets toward a regime of restricted access and engineered alliances. Instead of interconnectedness, the new model prioritizes compartmentalized networks guarded by political loyalty. Supply routes, once neutral infrastructure, are being recalibrated into tools of influence and control.
By casting AI and its critical inputs as national security concerns, Washington is turning economic interdependence into strategic leverage. Cloud infrastructure, data centers, refined metals, and even undersea cables each become a node of control.
The emphasis on private-sector “creativity and power” reveals a shifting balance in which real authority lies with corporations. These firms may operate within national borders, but their investment decisions – on where to build, what to cut, whom to serve – redraw the geopolitical map. This dystopian state–corporate fusion enables new forms of economic coercion: embargoes in everything but name.
The initiative also opens the door for the private sector to become a central geopolitical actor. Companies’ investment decisions – where to build factories, data centers, or design hubs – now shape international power balances as much as government policy. By controlling sensitive assets such as chips, cloud infrastructure, cables, and refined minerals, private firms can effectively turn supply chain nodes into tools of leverage or coercion. This dynamic fosters the emergence of domestic “tech lobbies” that pressure governments toward stricter regulations or sanctions, turning market competition into a political instrument and amplifying the potential for economic escalation between blocs.
The rise of techno-blocs
Pax Silica is less a defensive pact and more a forward deployment of economic discipline. It is the scaffolding of a techno-political bloc – an economic NATO for the AI age.
At its heart lies a blunt logic: control the raw materials and systems that make AI possible, and you control the world’s future. The text of the declaration itself acknowledges that the AI revolution is “reorganizing the global economy” and “reshaping supply chains,” and that “value and growth” will flow through “every level” of the global AI supply chain. In this way, the announcement redefined the next competition field as a complete chain starting with energy and metals and ending with chips, computing, and digital infrastructure.
US officials openly compare Pax Silica to the G7 during the industrial era – framing it as a coordination platform for a cartel of influence. It is a governing structure built not to manage competition, but to exclude rivals from the foundational infrastructure of tomorrow’s economy.
China emerges as the most present implicit context in western coverage of the initiative. In US President Donald Trump's administration's approach, control of certain sensitive links – especially critical metals and industrial capabilities associated with the chips – is seen as giving Beijing space to use “bottlenecks” politically.
Targeting China
Explicitly singling out China and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Helberg was quoted by POLITICO as saying:
“This is an industrial policy for the economic security coalition, and it’s a game-changer because there is no group today where we can come together on the AI economy and how we’re going to compete with China in the AI space. By aligning our economic security approaches, we can begin to move in concert to basically block China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is designed to grow its export-oriented model, by blocking China’s ability to buy up ports, major highways, transportation, and logistics corridors.”
Helberg added that “This grouping of countries will be to the AI age what the G7 was to the industrial age,” noting that “It commits us to a process by which we’re going to cooperate on aligning our export controls, screening of foreign investments, addressing anti-dumping but with a very proactive agenda on securing choke points in the global supply chain system.”
Beijing’s response has been cautious. On 12 December, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said, “We have noted relevant reports,” urging “All parties should adhere to the principles of a market economy and fair competition and work together to maintain the stability of the global supply chain.”
However, the state-run Global Times was more forthright, describing Pax Silica as a US attempt to decouple China from the global semiconductor supply chain – warning that such a move would destabilize markets and drive up costs.
Israel’s bid for AI centrality
Tel Aviv’s prominent role in Pax Silica reflects both the alliance’s core intentions and Israel’s strategic recalibration. Rather than a peripheral tech partner, Israel is positioned as a principal node in the AI economy – spanning resource access, design capabilities, and logistics.
Israeli commentators have openly described the move as a decisive alignment with Washington’s post-China economic order. Tel Aviv is exchanging political loyalty for secure entry into the command centers of AI development, viewing its participation as part of the broader US–China strategic rivalry and a “common front” against China’s dominance in critical minerals and advanced technologies. Once intent on avoiding direct confrontation with Beijing, Israel is now increasingly compelled to align with Washington, even at the cost of narrowing its own strategic and economic flexibility.
“Israel’s accession to the US-led Pax Silica Initiative is a mark of distinction for Israel and for Israel’s high-tech industry,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic advisor Avi Simhonin said in a statement, “which is regarded as a global leader in innovation and artificial intelligence.”
This decision also speaks to its regional dilemmas. Despite the expansion of normalization efforts – including ongoing diplomatic overtures toward Syria and Tel Aviv's recent recognition of Somaliland – Israel’s regional isolation remains unresolved.
Popular opposition to normalization persists across West Asia, and efforts to militarily weaken the Lebanese resistance continue. In this context, Tel Aviv’s fallback has been to entrench itself in transnational infrastructures protected by US dominance.
Its integration into Pax Silica represents a calculated hedge – an attempt to anchor its economic future in Washington-led frameworks while managing the long-term consequences of its colonial entrenchment.
As resistance spreads and normalization falters, Israel’s fallback is to entrench itself in transnational infrastructures shielded by US dominance. Its integration into Pax Silica represents an economic survival strategy – a bid to insulate itself from the consequences of its colonial entrenchment.
A new phase of economic confrontation
Pax Silica represents a transition in how Washington projects economic influence. Rather than relying on traditional trade frameworks, it is reshaping the rules of commerce to consolidate control over the lifelines of the AI economy. Innovation, once viewed as the driving force, now moves in lockstep with security doctrine.
The shift places AI within a hardened architecture of strategic planning, where access to materials, infrastructure, and data becomes a function of geopolitical loyalty. Economic networks no longer serve as shared platforms but as instruments of division and leverage.
For countries outside the core bloc, particularly in the Global South, this consolidation narrows strategic options. As supply chains are redrawn to reflect ideological alignment, access to critical systems increasingly depends on political positioning rather than economic need.
India’s absence from the framework, while notable, has been downplayed by US officials. Helberg referred to ongoing discussions with New Delhi, stating: “We view India as a highly strategic potential partner on supply chain security-related efforts, and we welcome the opportunity to engage with them.”
Washington’s endgame appears to be the construction of a digital fortress – an infrastructure of supremacy guarded by standards, restrictions, and selective cooperation. Whether this vision holds depends as much on material flows as on the willingness of others to either resist or submit to the structure it imposes.
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