In the 21st century, national security is no longer an exclusively military or diplomatic domain. It increasingly requires a deep understanding of economic policy, global value chains, and the industrial ecosystems that underpin critical technologies. It is precisely on this terrain that a widening disconnect has emerged between the challenges analysts and policymakers claim to address and the competencies actually required to do so.
From Military Security to Economic Security. Within think tanks and university departments of international relations, much of the strategic community continues to be trained through the classical lenses of realism and liberalism. Useful frameworks, but increasingly insufficient. These theoretical approaches are largely ill-suited to interpret — let alone govern — the realities of global supply chains, mineral value chains, advanced manufacturing, and emerging technologies. The result is a cognitive lag that now has direct consequences for national security.
- It is in this context that Pax Silica should be understood: the flagship initiative of the U.S. State Department on artificial intelligence and supply-chain security. It is not merely a forum for technological cooperation, but the most structured attempt so far to build a new consensus on economic security among U.S. allies and trusted partners.
- The underlying message is clear: security policy and industrial policy are now inseparable. The management of supply chains has become a central instrument of American power projection. And the gap between theory and practice — long ignored — can no longer be concealed.
Pax Silica and the Logic of Industrial Alliances. Pax Silica is also significant because of the composition of the group. The participating countries — Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia — are not linked solely by political affinity, but by complementary industrial capabilities. Some are leaders in the extraction and processing of critical minerals; others in logistics, advanced manufacturing, software, or system design. This is an alliance built around production, not just values.
- This approach reflects a late but now explicit acknowledgment in Washington: the neoliberal globalization of the past three decades — what some disparagingly label the “yellow arches” model — hollowed out the U.S. manufacturing base, strengthened strategic competitors and adversaries, and placed growing strain on the very promise of the American Dream. Cost efficiency was prioritized over resilience; offshoring over control.
- The shocks of recent years have made this fragility unmistakable. The Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more recently China’s use of export controls as a geopolitical weapon have exposed U.S. — and Western — vulnerabilities, while simultaneously highlighting the degree of strategic leverage accumulated by Beijing in key sectors.
Why Economic Security Has Become Strategic Power. The stakes are high. Over the past twenty years, the United States has ceded leadership in industries now considered vital to national security. From the early 1990s onward, China pursued a deliberate, state-driven strategy to dominate rare-earth processing and advanced manufacturing. The West, by contrast, progressively relinquished its comparative advantages, sector by sector, in the name of a global market premised on political neutrality and permanent geopolitical stability.
- That assumption has now collapsed. Economic security has become inseparable from control over energy, critical minerals, high-end manufacturing, and advanced computing and artificial-intelligence models. In this context, Pax Silica represents more than a technical initiative: it is an acknowledgment that future alliances will be built not only on military commitments or shared values, but on shared production, shared risk, and shared industrial capacity.
- With Pax Silica, the State Department signals that Washington has finally accepted a reality long deferred: economic power, industrial capability, and national security are part of a single system. Bringing industry back to the center of foreign policy is no longer an ideological choice, but a strategic necessity. In this sense, Pax Silica does not solve every problem, but it points in the right direction — and that alone marks a sharper turn than anything the West has attempted over the past thirty years.
The analysis is written by Gianclaudio Torlizzi, Founder of T-Commodity – Strategic Advisory & Market Intelligence, adviser to the Italian Minister of Defence, and author of “Materia Rara.”
