Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. The U.S. has a new strategy to beat China in the AI race.

Called "Pax Silica," (a nod to Pax Romana, the Roman Empire’s 2,000 year period of peace and prosperity) the initiative is the brainchild of Jacob Helberg, a 36-year-old former Google executive turned Trump administration official who believes America's technological dominance is in genuine danger. China controls the rare earth minerals, the supply chains, and increasingly the infrastructure that powers modern AI. No single country can fix that alone, so Helberg is building a coalition.

A growing group of countries have expressed interest, each contributing a critical need including Australia's minerals, Israel's cybersecurity, and Singapore's autonomous ports. The goal is something like an Amazon for the global technology supply chain that is reliable, scalable, and built without China. At home, that also means reindustrialization, including Apple's pledge to build an end-to-end silicon supply chain in the U.S.

But with allies growing skeptical of Washington, the biggest threat to Pax Silica may not be China at all.

In this article you'll find:

BY NANCY SCOLA

Speaking at the right-of-center think tank Hudson Institute on a snowy Thursday afternoon in Washington, D.C., Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg explained what drove his branch of the U.S. State Department to launch its new “Pax Silica” push: a clear-eyed awareness, he said, that has taken hold in President Donald Trump’s Washington that the country’s technological, economic, and national security is unacceptably threatened by China’s strategic dominance of many of the building blocks of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge innovation. 

Helberg, 36, is a former Google executive and adviser to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and the co-founder of the Hill & Valley Forum, launched in 2023 to connect Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley, in part to help the United States better organize a pushback against China. Helberg warned that the U.S. was vulnerable to “a supply chain concentrated in a single, volatile, geographic point, and a technological infrastructure increasingly reliant on people who don’t have our best interests at heart.”

And so, at a Washington, D.C., summit in December, the U.S. unveiled “Pax Silica,” a branding riff on similarly named periods of stability and prosperity rooted in the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago (Pax Romana) and in the Western Hemisphere post-World War II (Pax Americana). 

The initiative’s 475-word “Pax Silica Declaration” had an eye-catching list of initial signatories—Australia, Greece, Israel, Japan, Qatar, Korea, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom—committing to working together on building a “reliable supply chain” for producing modern technologies, from the mining and refining of rare-earth minerals to the production of semiconductor chips to the energy needed to power all that production.

“Each country has their own superpower,” Helberg explained to me when we sat down in a conference room after the event to go over the details. Australia, for example, as the home to the world’s fourth-largest reserves of rare-earth metals like neodymium and terbium, is especially good at mineral extraction. Singapore, sitting at the nexus of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea but lacking a domestic workforce, is exceptional at the autonomous operation of ports. Israel, with its military-honed technological armory and vibrant tech sector, is the world’s best at cybersecurity. 

“We really want to draw on each of their superpowers,” explained Helberg, refine them through pilot projects and rigorous testing, and then “scale it across the Pax Silica ecosystem.” 

The plan will have succeeded, he explains, when signatories have access to a far-reaching, secure, and predictable stack. “The canonical example is obviously Amazon,” Helberg had said during his onstage remarks. “We can do the same for our technology supply chain.” 

The potential upside, said Helberg, makes the call to other countries about something more than simply decoupling from China: “We actually want to build something completely transformative together.”

Raised in France by a French mother and an American father, Jacob Helberg came to the United States for college and ended up in Silicon Valley, where, from 2016 to 2020, he served as the global lead for search policy at Google. His 2021 book, The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power, describes how his time in the tech industry drove him to become increasingly worried about China’s role in that world. 

China had resources—Helberg points with alarm to a circa-1990 quote attributed to then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping: “The Middle East has oil, but China has rare earths”—and strategic thinking, like its Belt and Road Initiative. China has the tools and desire, warned Helberg, to exploit and even accelerate a period of “American industrial decline.”

A one-time major Democratic backer, Helberg began shifting his support to then-candidate Donald Trump, inspired, he has said, by what he saw as the Biden administration’s misguided handling of China and innovation. Co-founding Hill & Valley in 2023 helped solidify Helberg’s place as an emerging leader of the so-called tech right. Shortly after rewinning the presidency, Trump announced his intention to nominate Helberg to the position of Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. “In this role,” said Trump in a social media post at the time, “Jacob will be a champion of our America First foreign policy.” Helberg was sworn into office by Vice President JD Vance on October 16, 2025.

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