From Pax Americana to Pax Silica
From Values to Capabilities
When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Helsingborg in May 2026, he described Sweden as a particularly valuable addition to NATO. Previous new members had often joined because they were weak and needed protection, Rubio noted, whereas the two most recent members have brought capabilities to the alliance that NATO previously lacked. His statement was clearly intended to include Finland as well, even though the country was not mentioned explicitly. Rubio also noted that Sweden was the first European country to join the technological cooperation framework known as Pax Silica and highlighted Ericsson as a key Western actor in the competition with China and Huawei.
Rubio’s remarks capture something larger than Sweden’s and Finland’s accession to NATO. They point to a broader shift in how the West today legitimizes its alliances and security policies. NATO is no longer presented primarily as a community of values built on democracy, liberty, and Western identity, but increasingly as a network of strategic capabilities. The focus is less on shared values and more on what member states can concretely contribute: telecommunications, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, satellite systems, Arctic expertise, defense industries, and resilience.
In this sense, Finland and Sweden are no longer primarily security consumers but security providers. This is also where Pax Silica becomes interesting as both symbol and narrative. Regardless of how extensive or permanent the initiative ultimately proves to be, the name itself represents a possible paradigm shift. Pax Silica evokes Pax Americana, which in turn has often been compared to the Roman peace, Pax Romana. Under Pax Americana, the American-led world order was legitimized through free trade, globalization, universal markets, and the idea of mutual economic interdependence. The liberal international order rested on the assumption that open markets and global supply chains would themselves generate stability, prosperity, and peace.
Pax Silica suggests something different. Instead of a universal marketplace, the emphasis increasingly falls on controlled networks, strategic dependencies, and securitized supply chains. Instead of global free trade, a more selective and geopolitical economy is emerging, one in which states seek to control access to semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, satellite systems, and critical infrastructure. Trade policy is once again becoming security policy.
This also represents a limited return to mercantilist thinking. The difference is that today’s strategic resources consist not primarily of gold, grain, or colonial trade routes, but of data, semiconductors, computing power, telecommunications, and control over technological ecosystems. The central question is no longer merely who controls territory, but who controls the critical links in global supply chains.
Global Crises Expose the Weaknesses of Free Trade
The COVID-19 pandemic and later the war in Ukraine did not merely alter Western security priorities; they also changed the very language surrounding economics, trade, and globalization. At the height of globalization, just-in-time production, outsourcing, and global value chains were presented as rational and efficient solutions. The pandemic instead revealed how even simple products such as face masks could become strategically critical when production had been concentrated in China. The war in Ukraine further heightened awareness of vulnerabilities related to energy, raw materials, food supplies, and technological dependencies.
As a result, perceptions of what constitutes legitimate economic and trade policy have also changed. Concepts such as resilience, preparedness, strategic autonomy, and secure supply chains suddenly acquired central political importance. What had previously often been regarded as inefficient redundancy or protectionism increasingly came to be viewed as responsible security policy. Free trade and global integration lost some of their taken-for-granted legitimacy as dependencies came to be described more frequently as strategic risks.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House should also be understood against this backdrop. While Trump’s policies have undoubtedly accelerated the move toward protectionism, technological restrictions, and geopolitically motivated trade policies, the shift did not begin with Trump. Concerns about China’s technological rise, Western industrial dependencies, and vulnerabilities in global supply chains were already growing before his first presidency. Trump should therefore be seen less as the original cause of this transformation than as an expression of a broader change in attitudes toward globalization.
From Sand to Geopolitics
The name “Pax Silica” is well chosen—perhaps better chosen than its creators themselves fully realized. It is also symbolically apt. “Silica” evokes both silica, or silicon dioxide—that is, ordinary sand or quartz—and silicon, the element that gave its name to Silicon Valley and the semiconductor industry as a whole. Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust after oxygen and accounts for roughly one quarter of its mass. Ordinary sand consists largely of silicon dioxide.
At the same time, silicon’s unique properties as a metalloid have made it central to the digital revolution. As a semiconductor, silicon can, through the addition of minute quantities of other elements, be made to control electrical currents with extraordinary precision. It is this ability to regulate and modulate electrical signals that forms the basis of the transistors found in every modern computer chip.
Yet the journey from sand to advanced AI chips remains one of the most technologically sophisticated and resource-intensive industrial processes in the world. To be used in semiconductors, silicon must first be reduced from silicon dioxide and then purified to an almost unimaginable degree. This is followed by a long chain of highly advanced processing steps, including crystal growth, wafer production, lithography, and etching with precision measured in nanometers.
This is precisely why silicon illustrates the new geopolitical logic so well. The strategic asset lies not primarily in access to the raw material itself, but in control over processing, technology, energy, patents, and industrial capacity. In the digital age, power resides not only in natural resources but in the ability to transform sand into computing power.
As with rare earth elements, power therefore depends less on ownership of the raw material than on control over the value chain. This is also the background to current American efforts to build networks of technological partnerships and capability alliances stretching from raw materials to AI infrastructure. In this context, Nokia, Ericsson, ASML, and other strategic technology firms become not merely commercial enterprises but geopolitical assets.
For the general public, Nokia may still primarily be associated with mobile phones. From a geopolitical perspective, however, the company’s significance today lies in its role as a supplier of telecommunications infrastructure. After divesting its mobile phone business, Nokia was able to focus on network technologies and strengthen its market position through mergers and acquisitions. It is this type of capability—rather than consumer products—that has become strategically important in the emerging technological power struggle.
From Wandel durch Handel to Strategic Autonomy
The emerging order differs from the older Pax Americana in another important respect. At the height of American hegemony, the international economic order was presented, at least in principle, as voluntary and universal. The United States guaranteed open trade routes, dollar stability, and the functioning of global markets within a system in which allies were also allowed to benefit from free trade and economic integration.
In today’s technological conflict with China, the United States increasingly uses its control over patents, licenses, export regulations, and key technologies to influence even the relationships that allied states and companies maintain with China. The Dutch company ASML provides a revealing example. Although European, the company has effectively been prevented from selling its most advanced semiconductor technologies to China through American export controls and U.S. influence over critical components. Whereas Pax Americana largely rested on integration and voluntary participation, Pax Silica increasingly rests on control and restrictions.
Pax Americana was ultimately legitimized by the belief that peace, stability, and gradual liberalization could be promoted through free trade and mutual economic interdependence—summarized in the German phrase Wandel durch Handel (“change through trade”). The emerging technological order is legitimized by almost the opposite logic. If trade was once seen as a means of reducing conflict through interdependence, dependencies are now increasingly viewed as strategic vulnerabilities. The goal is no longer to integrate authoritarian powers into a common global marketplace, but to reduce dependence on them and limit their access to the most advanced technologies deemed crucial for future economic and military power. Instead of integration, resilience is emphasized. Instead of openness, control. Instead of technological diffusion, technological restriction.
A New Order Without a Community of Values?
The composition of the countries associated with Pax Silica also demonstrates that pragmatism often outweighs shared values today. Most participating states are Western democracies or close American allies. Yet both Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have been linked to the initiative, despite longstanding criticism—particularly of Qatar—for their relations with Islamist movements and for aspects of their foreign policy that have frequently conflicted with Western values.
This illustrates a broader shift in the logic of the Western order. Alliances and partnerships are increasingly built around functionality, strategic needs, and technological capabilities rather than shared values or identities. Yet this also raises questions about long-term loyalty and cohesion. If partnerships are based primarily on mutual benefit and strategic utility, what guarantees exist that they will remain stable if China offers more attractive economic terms or technological cooperation in the future?
A capability alliance may be efficient, but it also risks becoming more transactional and less stable than older security communities built upon shared identities and legitimizing narratives. In this respect, Pax Silica differs from earlier hegemonic orders such as Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana. All ultimately rested on a dominant center of power that guaranteed a certain form of stability and order. Pax Silica, however, does not represent a traditional empire with a clear territorial center. Rather, it is a network of technological and industrial dependencies in which power is exercised through control over standards, semiconductors, telecommunications, software, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure systems.
This development also requires new legitimizing narratives. The globalized economy under Pax Americana could long be portrayed as almost natural and self-legitimizing. Free trade, outsourcing, and global supply chains were seen as universally rational and mutually beneficial. Today’s neo-mercantilist order, by contrast, requires far stronger forms of legitimation because it is built upon restrictions, selectivity, and geopolitical discrimination.
Security as Legitimation
This is where the security narrative becomes central. Export controls, investment restrictions, technological blocs, industrial subsidies, and state intervention are now justified through narratives of national security, resilience, and strategic autonomy. This does not mean that the security dimension is artificial. On the contrary, advanced technology has become increasingly important for both military systems and geopolitical power. Artificial intelligence, satellites, telecommunications, and semiconductors are now as strategically important as oil and maritime routes once were. Yet security also functions as a form of legitimation for a broader geopolitical and economic restructuring whose ultimate purpose is to preserve the power position of the West—and above all that of the United States—in competition with China.
For smaller Western states such as Finland and Sweden, this creates limited strategic room for maneuver. Nokia and Ericsson provide our countries with important strategic assets, but they also make us natural components of the U.S.-led network of technological partnerships represented by Pax Silica. The Nordic countries can hardly wait for Europe alone to emerge as an independent third power bloc between the United States and China. Their economies and security systems are already deeply integrated into Western—and especially American—technological infrastructure. For that reason, partnership with the United States, despite all the uncertainties and contradictions of American politics, appears to be the only realistic option.
Pax Silica may be less a fully formed system than a sign that a new world order is beginning to emerge—an order in which technology, security, resilience, and control over critical networks gradually replace free trade and universal globalization as the primary principles of international organization and legitimation.