I wrote my previous article on the materialization of visionary strategies as I was noticing the pattern and still on the learning curve. Since then I have kept digging — and what follows is a comprehensive look at where we are headed.

Executive Summary

Between 1993 and 2025, a series of strategic documents quietly mapped out a vision for how the world should be reorganized. Some came from think tanks. Some from political insiders. Some are now official U.S. government policy.

Taken separately, they look like dry policy papers. Read together, they describe a thirty-year vision for a U.S.-anchored world order in which the Middle East gets restructured around Israel and the Gulf, Iran gets pushed to the margins, China gets boxed out of the technologies that matter most, and a whole new network of corridors replaces the old arteries of global trade.

In December 2025, that vision got a name. Pax Silica.

We went from Pax Romana to Pax Britannica to Pax Americana. And now we are watching the early stages of something new — an era built not on oil, dollars, and aircraft carriers, but on chips, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure.

This report traces that arc. The documents. The players. The predictions that came true. The ones that did not. And the threads connecting all of it to what is unfolding right now in Gaza, in the Gulf, in the Arctic, and in the semiconductor factories of East Asia.

Pax Silica: What It Is

On December 11 and 12 of 2025, the U.S. Department of State hosted the inaugural Pax Silica Summit in Washington D.C. The name is intentional and layered. Pax Romana. Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. Pax Silica. Each one marks a shift in who holds the reins of global order. “Silica” points directly to silicon — the foundational material behind semiconductors and AI computing. The State Department calls it their flagship effort on AI and supply chain security.

The Architect

The man behind the vision is Jacob Helberg, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment. His résumé is worth sitting with: former Google search policy lead, senior adviser to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, former commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, co-founder of the Hill and Valley Forum (built in 2023 specifically to bridge Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill), author of The Wires of War, and one of the largest individual donors to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it. — Jacob Helberg, framing the doctrine

Who Signed

When the summit wrapped, seven countries had signed on: the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Israel. By spring of 2026 that list had grown to include the UAE, Qatar, India, Sweden, Finland, Greece, and the Philippines.

The Netherlands showed up but did not sign — largely because of ASML’s unique monopoly position in semiconductor lithography — and pursued a separate bilateral track instead. Taiwan endorsed the principles through a joint statement with the U.S. but is not an official signatory. The EU, Canada, and the OECD attended as observers.

What Pax Silica Is Actually Doing

The State Department has put an initial $250 million on the table through what they are calling the Pax Silica Fund — earmarked for critical minerals extraction, processing, and trusted infrastructure projects (still pending Congressional appropriation to fully materialize).

The projects already taking shape give a clear picture of where this is headed:

When you zoom out, the pattern is consistent: physical zones, infrastructure, compute, minerals. The building blocks of a new kind of economic power being deliberately placed in strategically chosen locations across the globe.

How Pax Silica Actually Works

Pax Silica is not a traditional treaty alliance. Think of it more as a coalition of nodes, where every member country controls a specific chokepoint in the AI supply chain. Analysts at the Atlantic Council, GIS Reports, EE Times, Real Instituto Elcano, and the Hudson Institute all converge on the same conclusion: this framework deliberately elevates economic security to the same level as national security.

What Each Member Brings to the Table

“Removing Borders” — What That Actually Means

There is a phrase that keeps coming up around Pax Silica that is worth unpacking: “removing borders.” It sounds like it could mean one thing when it actually means something quite specific.

This is not about dissolving political borders between countries. What it describes is the removal of economic, regulatory, and digital friction among trusted partners, while simultaneously raising much higher walls against China.

In practice that looks like:

• Aligned export controls where allies treat each other’s regulations as their own
• Cross-investment funds and harmonized AI rules (e.g., the U.S.–India TRUST framework)
• Joint-governance Economic Security Zones where sovereignty is shared between partners
• Trusted fiber optic cables, data centers, and AI models flowing freely among members
• Loss of access to frontier chips for countries deemed too dependent on Chinese supply chains

The Spanish think tank Real Instituto Elcano frames it bluntly: there are allies who are inside the technology stack and build real interdependence, and there are clients who can buy products but only on Washington’s terms.

The goal is not to freeze China out entirely. The goal is to keep China roughly 18 months behind the frontier — permanently. — The “moving gap” doctrine

A telling example came in December 2025 when the U.S. allowed Nvidia H200 exports to approved Chinese customers but attached a 25% government fee. That move illustrated what analysts are calling the “moving gap” doctrine.

From Pax Americana to Pax Silica

To really feel the weight of this shift, it helps to hold both eras side by side.

For decades, Pax Americana’s assumption that geopolitics wouldn’t seriously disrupt supply chains held. Pax Silica operates on a different foundation entirely. The dominant power no longer underwrites global stability through sea lanes alone — it moves through compute, chips, minerals, and the data infrastructure that makes artificial intelligence possible.

Instead of universal openness, the operating principle is selective decoupling: choose your partners carefully, build deep interdependence with them, manage everyone else at arm’s length. Helberg described it at the Hudson Institute as an economic security coalition built on the reality that security and technological edge are now inseparable.

Two Readings, Both Worth Sitting With

How you see this shift depends a lot on where you are standing.

Critics — including voices at The New Arab and Global Times — read it as the United States responding to the erosion of its dominance rather than confidently extending it.

Proponents — at the Atlantic Council, Hudson Institute, and the State Department — frame it as something more ambitious: building what they call the “Amazon of allied technology stacks.”

Both readings are worth sitting with. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The New Middle East (1993)

In the same season the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres published a book that laid out a sweeping vision for what the Middle East could become. Translated into 17 languages, it landed at a moment of genuine optimism.

The Core Idea

Peres believed the Arab-Israeli conflict could be transcended the same way post-war Europe had been transformed — not through military dominance but through economic interdependence. The same logic that gave birth to the European Coal and Steel Community and the Benelux model.

Build enough shared infrastructure, common markets, joint tourism, water cooperation, and energy grids, and you create something powerful: people with a vested interest in peace because the alternative costs them too much. Six of the book’s fourteen chapters focus entirely on economics. Specific proposals included a Red Sea–Dead Sea canal, a regional free trade zone, and a Gaza port that would service Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Iraq.

There are only two alternatives for the Levant: Benelux or Yugoslavia. — Shimon Peres, summarizing the thesis

A Reckoning

Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab reviewed the book in 1994 and wrote that you cannot dream of a new Middle East without changing the policies of occupation. The Gaza war of 2023 to 2025 gave that warning a haunting kind of weight.

One more layer worth knowing: the very next document in this lineage — A Clean Break — was written specifically to push back against Peres. Same destination, radically different road.

A Clean Break (1996)

Prepared specifically for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this document opens with a direct rejection of everything Peres had written three years earlier. No more Oslo. No more land for peace. No more “New Middle East” built on economic cooperation. The authors called Peres’s framework “Israeli strategic paralysis.”

The Prescriptions

• Replace land-for-peace with “peace for peace” — Arab acceptance of Israeli terms
• Reestablish preemption as a cornerstone of Israeli strategy
• Work with Turkey and Jordan to roll back Syria, using Syrian WMD as justification if needed
• Remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq, with eventual replacement by a Hashemite-restored monarchy
• Contain, weaken, and roll back Iran
• Pursue ballistic missile defense cooperation with Washington
• Relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem

The document is publicly available on Douglas Feith’s own website — which is itself worth pausing on.

A Reckoning

The authors did not just write about these ideas — several went on to hold the offices that would execute them. Perle, Feith, and Wurmser all served in the George W. Bush administration. Feith as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Wurmser as Cheney’s Middle East adviser.

Through-line: hard to ignore.

Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000)

The list of participants reads like a preview of the George W. Bush administration. Nearly all went on to hold senior positions in that administration.

The Central Argument

The unipolar moment America enjoyed after the Cold War was not something to take for granted. It needed to be actively preserved through the preeminence of U.S. military power. Four core missions anchored the vision:

• Defend the homeland
• Fight and decisively win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars
• Perform “constabulary duties” around the world
• Transform the military for the information age

The document also called for permanent U.S. forces in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East as “zones of American peace,” global missile defense, control of the new commons of space and cyberspace, and defense spending of 3.5–3.8% of GDP.

Page 51

The kind of military transformation we are calling for would be slow to materialize, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor. — Rebuilding America’s Defenses, p. 51

That line became one of the most debated sentences in modern political history. In context, the document was describing political reality — major institutional change rarely happens without crisis forcing it. It was not a prescription. Mainstream scholars including Philip Hammond have noted the report was largely a transparent articulation of standard neoconservative thinking, and that its predictive accuracy has more to do with its authors later holding the offices that enacted its recommendations than with any hidden design.

A Reckoning

Which Path to Persia? (2009)

A 170-page analysis paper that has aged in ways its authors probably did not anticipate. Riedel, at the time, was chairing Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review. The paper was later expanded into a full book.

The Structure

Nine options organized into four broad categories:

• Dissuade — diplomacy, persuasion, engagement
• Disarm — U.S. airstrikes, invasion, and a chapter titled “Leave it to Bibi” exploring greenlighting an Israeli strike
• Topple — velvet revolution, ethnic minority insurgency, military coup
• Contain

The authors carefully frame the paper as analysis rather than advocacy — they do not formally endorse any single path. But pages 84 and 85 are what people keep coming back to.

It would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for airstrikes before launching them. The more outrageous, deadly, and unprovoked the Iranian action, the better positioned the U.S. would be. — Which Path to Persia?, pp. 84–85

The authors acknowledge that “goading Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing the game would be very difficult.” One method they suggest: ratcheting up covert regime-change efforts in the hope that Tehran retaliates overtly, which could then be framed as unprovoked Iranian aggression.

The paper also discusses backing the MEK and NCRI opposition groups, exploiting ethnic fault lines (Kurdish, Baluch, Arab, Azeri), and using Persian-language media (VOA Persian, Radio Farda) to shape internal opinion.

This is a published, publicly available Brookings Institution document. Written by credentialed mainstream scholars. Discussed openly in policy circles for fifteen years.

A Reckoning

That passage on pages 84–85 has taken on a life of its own. It surfaces in international media almost every time an incident involving Iran gets attributed without clear evidence — not because the paper prescribed anything, but because it acknowledged the logic so openly that people cannot unread it.

Blood Borders (2006)

The premise was blunt: the borders drawn by Sykes-Picot after World War I are fundamentally unjust — colonial lines carved through living communities with no regard for ethnicity, sect, language, or culture. Peters argued a more stable Middle East would require redrawing those lines along what he called “organic frontiers.”

The Proposed Map

• A Free Kurdistan carved from Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria
• An Arab Shia state
• A Greater Lebanon
• A Greater Jordan
• A Free Baluchistan
• A shrunken Saudi Arabia (Holy Cities as a separate city-state)
• Israel returning to roughly pre-1967 lines

Peters called it a thought experiment. But in September 2006, the map was reportedly displayed at the NATO Defense College in Rome — triggering a formal protest from Turkey to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. That is a significant reaction to something someone claims was purely theoretical.

The reason this document belongs in this lineage is not because Peters had operational influence the way the Clean Break authors did. It belongs here because the map has circulated continuously through Middle Eastern strategic discourse ever since — often alongside the older Bernard Lewis Plan from the 1980s, which similarly discussed the fragmentation of Iran and surrounding states along ethnic and sectarian lines.

A Reckoning

Loose correspondence with what has actually happened since 2006:

None of this followed Peters’s map precisely. But the underlying logic — that these borders were always under pressure and that pressure would eventually find a way out — has been difficult to dismiss.

The Longer Telegram (2021)

A 26,000-word strategy paper whose title was a deliberate nod to George Kennan’s 1946 Long Telegram — the document that defined America’s containment strategy toward the Soviet Union for an entire generation. The message: this moment calls for that kind of thinking.

The Central Argument

U.S. strategy toward China needed to stop being diffuse and become laser-focused on one person: Xi Jinping, his inner circle, and the political environment they operate in. Importantly, the goal was not framed as regime change or dismantling the CCP. The goal was a change in behavior — and eventually a change in leadership — achieved by quietly exploiting fault lines within the Party elite itself.

Broader pillars: rebuilding American economic and technological supremacy, fully operationalizing the Quad (with India, Japan, Australia), breaking what the paper called the strategic condominium between China and Russia, establishing clear red lines around Taiwan/South China Sea/cyber, and reinvesting deeply in allied relationships.

The paper landed with unusual force for a think tank publication. Senator Dan Sullivan called it one of the best strategies he had ever read. A Politico simulcast ensured it reached policy audiences across the aisle simultaneously. Bipartisan consensus on China, which had been building for years, effectively crystallized around its framing.

A Reckoning

Project 2025 (2023)

Key Prescriptions

• Treat China as “the most significant danger to Americans’ security, freedoms, and prosperity”; pivot U.S. foreign policy to Indo-Pacific
• Modernize and expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal; resume testing
• Sustain ironclad support for Israel; defund the Palestinian Authority; build new Middle Eastern security architecture on the Abraham Accords
• Hardline Iran policy; reject the JCPOA; barely-veiled regime-change advocacy
• Reorganize foreign aid (USAID) and pull back from international organizations

Map to Today (Trump’s Second Term, 2025–)

The tariff regime, USAID restructuring, foreign aid freeze, embassy posture, Abraham Accords expansion, “maximum pressure” on Iran, and Pax Silica’s Indo-Pacific tilt all map directly to Project 2025 prescriptions.

Recent Documents (2020–2025)

The Abraham Accords (2020 →)

On September 15, 2020, the Trump administration’s first term produced something decades of conventional diplomacy had failed to deliver: formal normalization between Israel and multiple Arab states, mediated through Jared Kushner. Initial signatories: Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain — with Morocco and Sudan joining shortly after.

What made it historically significant beyond the headlines was the framework it operated on. Land for peace was officially retired. Peace for peace — Arab acceptance of Israeli terms — took its place. Exactly as A Clean Break had prescribed in 1996.

Trump’s second administration has continued expanding the circle. Kazakhstan joined in November 2025. Active pursuit of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, and Somaliland is underway, with the Somaliland track reportedly tied to Israeli recognition of Somaliland’s statehood.

IMEC: The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor

On September 9, 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in New Delhi, a memorandum of understanding was signed that most mainstream coverage barely paused on. Signatories: India, the U.S., the UAE, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, the EU — with Israel and Jordan as essential transit nodes.

Atlantic Council research describes IMEC as the connective tissue that would carry Pax Silica goods and data — linking advanced manufacturing zones, AI data centers, and mineral refining across the corridor. Explicitly designed as a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The October 2023 Gaza war stalled momentum significantly. The 2025 ceasefire and the EU-India trade deal in January 2026 revived it, with Trieste now designated as a strategic European gateway.

Trump’s Gaza Riviera & the GREAT Trust (2025)

On February 4, 2025, President Trump proposed a U.S. takeover of Gaza to be redeveloped as “the Riviera of the Middle East.” A 38-page document obtained by the Washington Post in September 2025 filled in the details:

• A ten-year U.S. trusteeship
• Voluntary relocation of two million Palestinians with cash bonuses, rent, and food subsidies
• Six to eight AI-powered smart cities
• A manufacturing hub
• Digital tokens called the GREAT Trust issued to landowners and redeemable for rebuilt residences
• Self-governance under the Abraham Accords as the stated end state
• Estimated reconstruction value: $324 billion

That plan evolved into the September 29, 2025 Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict — a 20-point peace plan signed in Egypt on October 9, 2025. A Board of Peace co-chaired by Trump and Tony Blair was granted sweeping authority over implementation. The UN Security Council endorsed it on November 17, 2025. The Middle East Council on Global Affairs noted that Trump and Blair had actually been developing Gaza reconstruction ideas together for roughly fifteen years, going back to Blair’s time as Quartet representative.

Reactions have been sharply divided. The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies called it a blueprint for dispossession. Alternative frameworks on the table include the RAND Corporation’s From Camps to Communities (March 2025), an Arab League and Egyptian $53 billion reconstruction plan from the same month, and the Palestinian-authored Gaza Phoenix Initiative.

Greenland and the Arctic (2025)

Trump’s push to acquire Greenland — revived in December 2024 and underscored by J.D. Vance’s March 2025 visit to Pituffik Space Base — is grounded in three concrete strategic realities:

The policy moves have followed in rapid succession: an executive order on unleashing Alaska’s resource potential (Jan 20, 2025); a second executive order accelerating deep-sea mining (April 2025); a $120 million Export-Import Bank letter of interest for the Tanbreez rare-earth mine (June 2025); a presidential memorandum on Arctic Security Cutters (October 2025); the ICE Pact with Finland and Canada for icebreaker shipbuilding (November 2025); and the U.S.-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund signed in April 2025, which includes exclusive U.S. access to Ukrainian minerals.

Other Documents Worth Knowing

Jacob Helberg’s book The Wires of War (Simon & Schuster, 2021) laid out the intellectual case for treating the technology supply chain as the new primary theater of great-power conflict. Reading it now, it functions essentially as a preview of Pax Silica.

The U.S. National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy (both 2022), along with Biden-era executive orders on semiconductor export controls (2022, 2023, 2024), built the legal architecture that Pax Silica later formalized.

CSIS research from 2024–2025 documented that the U.S. imports between 50 and 100 percent of 41 out of 50 critical minerals — a vulnerability that gives everything else in this section its urgency.

The EU passed its Critical Raw Materials Act in 2023 and published its own Economic Security Strategy the same year, representing the European parallel to the same logic. The Heritage Foundation published Project Esther in 2024 — a strategic countermessaging plan targeting pro-Palestinian movements — which sits alongside Project 2025’s Israel chapter as part of the same policy ecosystem. And the Foreign Policy Initiative, effectively PNAC’s successor organization, continues producing strategy papers on China, Iran, and tech sovereignty that carry the lineage forward.

The Connecting Thread

When you read these documents as a collection rather than in isolation, four long-term projects come into focus. Each one has been unfolding across decades. Each one is visible in today’s headlines if you know what you are looking at.

1. Restructuring the Middle East

Peres in 1993 dreamed of a Benelux-style Middle East where economic interdependence would make peace inevitable — with the Palestinian question resolved at the front end as a foundation. A Clean Break in 1996 took the same destination and completely inverted the road: same regional integration, but the Palestinians get sidelined and the hostile regimes get dismantled first. Iraq. Syria. Iran. Hezbollah. Hamas. Then you build.

Follow the arc forward. The Abraham Accords in 2020 delivered the peace-for-peace model exactly as Clean Break prescribed. The Gaza war from 2023 to 2025 and the Iran confrontation in 2025 effectively cleared the last two items on the Clean Break checklist. Assad’s Syria fell in December 2024. Iran was struck in June 2025. And now Trump’s Riviera plan and the Gaza 20-point peace plan are offering the economic integration endgame Peres originally envisioned — but on Clean Break’s political terms. Palestinians are being displaced or placed under trusteeship rather than offered statehood.

2. Containing China at the Compute Frontier

PNAC in 2000 identified cyberspace as a contested commons worth controlling. The Longer Telegram in 2021 named China as the defining challenge of the century. Project 2025 operationalized the strategic pivot. Pax Silica in 2025 is the institutional architecture that brings it all together.

The progression is traceable and deliberate: CHIPS Act (2022) → semiconductor export controls (2022, 2023, 2024) → Pax Silica (2025). Each step in sequence, building what you could describe as an allied technology stack constructed around the specific chokepoints that matter most: High-Bandwidth Memory. EUV lithography. ARM IP. Rare-earth refining. Sovereign AI capital. China sits in a managed lag — kept roughly 18 months behind the frontier as a matter of policy.

3. Building Alternative Corridors

Peres in 1993 envisioned regional rail, ports, and pipelines. PNAC in 2000 talked about controlling the global commons. When China launched Belt and Road in 2013 and began financing infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East at a scale no one had seen before, it forced a response.

That response has taken shape across multiple fronts simultaneously:

Each piece has a role. Pax Silica provides the digital and AI layer. IMEC provides the physical corridor. The Abraham Accords provide the political glue that makes the Middle East transit viable. Greenland and the Arctic are the northern flank. Ukraine’s mineral deal is the eastern flank.

What came true: every corridor has been launched and is at least in motion. What didn’t: Belt and Road still vastly outweighs the Western alternatives in projects financed and built on the ground. And IMEC lost critical momentum when the Gaza war broke out in October 2023.

4. Iran as the Last Domino

In 2007, General Wesley Clark publicly disclosed that shortly after 9/11 he had seen a Pentagon memo listing seven countries targeted for regime change: Iraq. Syria. Lebanon. Libya. Somalia. Sudan. Iran.

By 2026, six of those seven have experienced regime collapse, civil war, or significant foreign military intervention. Iran is the last one standing.

The menu laid out in the Brookings 2009 paper — provocation-justified airstrikes, Israeli proxy strikes, ethnic minority insurgency, MEK support, velvet revolution — maps closely onto the operational patterns that have played out across U.S. and Israeli strategy over the past fifteen years.

What This All Means

The headlines of 2025 and 2026 are not random. The Pax Silica Summit. The Abraham Accords expansion. The IMEC revival. Trump’s Greenland push. The Gaza Riviera plan. The Iran air war. The U.S.-China chip rivalry.

These are not separate stories. They are the operational phase of strategic ideas that have been published, debated, and refined across thirty years — in white papers from the IASPS, AEI, PNAC, Brookings’s Saban Center, the Atlantic Council, Heritage, Hudson, CSIS, and now the U.S. State Department itself.

The shift in language alone tells you something important.

Pax Americana spoke in the vocabulary of aircraft carriers, free trade agreements, and the dollar. Pax Silica speaks in the vocabulary of lithography machines, rare-earth refineries, AI data centers, and trusted nodes.

The borders being opened are not territorial — they are regulatory. The friction points that previously kept allied economies from fully integrating. The borders being raised are technological, built specifically against China and any state deemed too dependent on Chinese supply chains.

In the Middle East, something particularly significant has happened over this thirty-year arc. The integrating vision of Peres in 1993 and the regime-restructuring logic of Clean Break in 1996 have gradually fused into a single project. And through all of it — across every plan from Peres to Clean Break to the Abraham Accords to the 2025 Gaza Riviera — the Palestinian question has functioned as the one variable that nobody has solved. Every framework has tried to engineer around it. None have gone through it.

The Question Worth Sitting With

For those who follow policy closely, the relevant question is not really whether a plan exists. Many plans exist. They overlap, they contradict each other on meaningful points, and they have all been publicly available the entire time.

The more important question is which version of this vision actually serves long-term interests, and at what cost to legitimacy when the means being used — forced displacement, provocation as pretext, fragmenting states along ethnic lines — collide with the stated ends of peace, prosperity, and a rules-based international order.

For everyone else, the takeaway is more straightforward. The documents are out there. They are not classified. They are not hidden. And reading them brings a clarity to current events that the daily news cycle almost never provides.

The map was drawn long before most of us looked up.