Pax Americana to Pax Silica: Strategic Shifts in US Security Policy

From Pax Americana to Pax Silica, US grand strategy is undergoing a quiet but consequential transformation. In this timely commentary, Dr. Prerna Chahar argues that recent US security documents—the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act—signal a shift away from global stewardship toward a selective, technology-centered, and leverage-driven order. Rather than underwriting international rules and alliances, Washington is increasingly exercising power through control over strategic technologies, supply chains, and infrastructural chokepoints—a model Dr. Chahar conceptualizes as Pax Silica. This reorientation prioritizes hemispheric consolidation, technological dominance, and transactional partnerships over normative leadership. For partners such as India, the implications are profound: engagement remains valuable but conditional, reinforcing the logic of strategic autonomy, calibrated cooperation, and multi-alignment in a fragmented global order.

By Prerna Chahar*

What is unfolding in US security policy is neither isolationism nor traditional internationalism, but a selective strategy centered on leverage, technology, and regional primacy. American grand strategy is undergoing a quiet yet consequential transformation one that redefines how power is exercised, how partnerships are valued, and how international order is sustained. Recent US strategic documents, the National Security Strategy (NSS), and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) point to a decisive shift away from managing global order toward consolidating national advantage, with far-reaching implications for allies and partners.

The National Security Strategy (NSS), published on December 4, 2025, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026, signed into law on December 18, 2025, together confirm that the era of Pax Americana characterized by institutional stewardship, alliance management, and normative leadership is giving way to a more selective, technology-centered, and transactional order. This emerging configuration may be described as Pax Silica: an order grounded less in alliances and rules and more in control over technology, supply chains, and strategic chokepoints.

NSS and NDAA: Reframing US Grand Strategy

The framing of the NSS 2025 itself signals a deliberate break from earlier approaches to American grand strategy. Four recurring themes encapsulate this reorientation.

First, the strategy explicitly rejects “old policies,” portraying past commitments to liberal internationalism, open-ended multilateralism, and interventionism as having diluted US sovereignty, weakened economic resilience, and overstretched strategic focus. This narrative of rupture legitimizes a more restrained and interest-driven approach to global engagement.

Second, the NSS defines what America wants with unusual clarity. Rather than emphasizing the maintenance of international order, it articulates bounded national priorities border security, economic nationalism, technological dominance, and hemispheric stability. Global leadership is no longer treated as an intrinsic responsibility but as a derivative of clearly specified national interests.

Third, both the NSS and the NDAA foreground American strength in material rather than normative terms. The NDAA 2026 authorizes over $900 billion in national defense funding, making it one of the largest defense policy bills in recent history. This level of spending underscores a sustained emphasis on military readiness, industrial capacity, and technological superiority. Military capability, innovation ecosystems, industrial depth, and technological leadership take precedence over values-based diplomacy, institutional rule-making, or normative influence.

The NDAA further operationalizes this shift through enhanced cybersecurity authorities, frameworks for the secure development and deployment of artificial intelligence and machine-learning systems and strengthened protections for US Cyber Command and digital infrastructure. It also expands authorities related to airspace security and counter-unmanned aerial systems under provisions such as the Safer Skies Act broadening civil and federal counter-drone capabilities. Together, these measures reflect the logic of Pax Silica, in which control over technology and infrastructure replaces institutional stewardship as the primary currency of influence.

Fourth, the NSS report clarifies the renewed strategic focus on the Western Hemisphere. While global competition remains important, the strategy prioritizes hemispheric stability, border control, migration management, and economic dominance within the Americas. This represents a modernized revival of Monroe Doctrine logic, where securing influence in the immediate neighborhood is treated as foundational to national security. Engagement beyond the hemisphere is increasingly selective and interest-driven, filtered through considerations of domestic security, economic resilience, and technological advantage rather than assumptions of automatic leadership. The NDAA reinforces this orientation by prioritizing resources for homeland protection, maritime domain awareness in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and defense readiness tied to territorial security. Together, these documents signal a shift from global managerial ambitions toward consolidation of power closer to home.

Taken collectively, these elements reflect a fundamental strategic reorientation. Rather than presenting the United States as the custodian of international order, the NSS positions it as a state intent on consolidating advantage, preserving autonomy, and exercising leverage. This underscores the durability of what may be termed the Trump Corollary: the notion that alliances, institutions, and global engagements are instruments to be justified by tangible returns rather than commitments sustained for systemic stability or normative leadership.

US ‘Pax Silica’: Renewed Instrument of Power

Within this hemispheric and technological reorientation, Pax Silica captures the defining feature of the emerging order: power exercised through technological and infrastructural dominance rather than institutional rule-making. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, digital platforms, and financial networks now constitute the backbone of strategic competition. Control over access to these systems enables coercion and influence without overt force.

Edward Fishman, in his book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, demonstrates how American power increasingly operates through the regulation of markets, technology flows, and supply chains, an approach clearly visible in export controls, investment screening, and technology-denial regimes embedded in both the NSS and the NDAA. Unlike Pax Americana, which relied on openness, predictability, and alliance cohesion, Pax Silica is exclusionary and conditional. Cooperation is granted rather than guaranteed; access replaces inclusion as the principal mechanism of influence.

The most consequential aspect of this transition is the decoupling of power from stewardship. The United States remains pre-eminent, but it no longer seeks to underwrite global order as a public good. Instead, it prioritizes regional consolidation, technological control, and transactional leverage. This is not withdrawal, but re-hierarchization: the Western Hemisphere first, strategic technologies second, and global commitments contingent on domestic advantage.

Implications for India

The renewed US focus on the Western Hemisphere carries important implications for India. While the Indo-Pacific remains relevant, it is no longer the singular organizing theatre of US grand strategy. Engagement in Asia is increasingly shaped by cost-benefit calculations and capability contributions rather than long-term commitments to regional order. For India, this creates both opportunity and uncertainty. Reduced ideological pressure allows greater strategic autonomy, but transactional partnerships demand constant negotiation. Cooperation in defense, technology, and supply-chain resilience particularly in semiconductors and critical technologies remains valuable yet inherently conditional. India’s participation in groupings such as the Quad must therefore be understood as calibrated engagement rather than alignment, reinforcing the logic of multi-alignment and diversification.

Conclusion

The shift from Pax Americana to Pax Silica reflects a profound transformation in US statecraft. The renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, combined with technological competition and transactional diplomacy, marks a move away from global stewardship toward selective, leverage-based power. For partners such as India, the challenge is to engage without illusion cooperating where interests converge, hedging where vulnerabilities emerge, and sustaining strategic autonomy in a world where leadership is fragmented and power is increasingly exercised through control rather than consensus.

(*) Dr. Prerna Chahar is a scholar of International Relations with published research on US foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific, regional coalition-building, and India’s foreign policy. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Centre for the Study of the Americas (CCUS&LAS), School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.