The trouble with ‘Pax’

Pax Silica has an image problem. Before I explain why, let me tell you what it is about.

Pax Silica is a flagship effort of the U.S. government on AI and supply chain security, “advancing new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners.” It has already 24 signatory-countries including the Philippines. Taiwan, meanwhile is considered a non-signatory participant.

The Pax Silica Declaration commits participating countries to building a trusted, secure, and integrated AI-centered economic order spanning semiconductors, critical minerals, energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, data networks, and software. It seeks to reduce dependence on unreliable suppliers, counter unfair market practices, protect sensitive technologies, and mobilize private investment among strategic partners.

The Philippines joined Pax Silica on April 16, 2026. No construction crew is on site yet, but the Philippine and U.S. governments have announced plans for a 4,000-acre economic-security and industrial zone in New Clark City, intended to host mineral processing, semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, AI-related facilities, logistics, and supporting infrastructure.

It is too early to pass judgment on Pax Silica as a project, particularly when no ground has yet been broken and its actual benefits and costs remain uncertain. Yet it already suffers from an image problem.

The word “pax” is Latin for peace and, by extension, a stable international order. But the same word is historically associated with the Pax Romana. Do you remember that from world history class?

Pax, in the tradition of the Pax Romana, does not evoke peace in the ordinary sense of harmony among equals founded on justice. The historical problem with ‘pax’ lies precisely in what historian Toni Naco del Hoyo describes in his work, “War, peace and Rome’s empire-building ideology in the making,” (2020) as its gradual incorporation into an empire-building ideology, in which stability went hand in hand with the permanent subjection and integration of provincial peoples into a world order centered on Rome. In other words, the word pax (peace) became part of the ideology by which the Roman Empire justified itself.

That is where I got the sense that there was something about the name Pax Silica that does not quite sound right. That does not mean Pax Silica is today’s version of the Roman Empire, nor is it fair, this early, to judge what the initiative will eventually become.

In its Roman historical context, pax connoted military and territorial dominance. In the emerging AI economy, that dominance may instead be technological, which means control over chips, critical minerals, energy, data infrastructure, supply chains, and the rules governing access to them – all of which sounds like a recipe for intense competition, if not war.

Pax gives one that niggling feeling that we are being unnecessarily drawn into the orbit of a dominant power, and possibly into troubles that are not necessarily our own. And it does not help that the current U.S. president is Donald Trump, a leader whose instinct for conflict and disruption hardly inspires confidence that this new “pax” is principally about shared prosperity and peace but more like a plan to organize the emerging technological oder around technological dominance, exclusion, and control.

This is not a call to junk the initiative altogether. With an increasingly dominant and aggressive China that does not share the democratic values of the free world, there is indeed a need for cooperation among freedom-loving nations to construct a secure technological order based on shared benefits and capabilities.

Pax Silica has sensible elements – secure semiconductor supply chains, critical-mineral processing, AI infrastructure, reliable telecommunications, energy security, and protection against coercive economic practices – but it remains to be seen what principles does it operate under

Is it going to be partnership rather than alignment or loyalty to one dominant power? Will it allow technology transfer, not merely investment, leading developing countries like the Philippines to acquire engineering capability, intellectual know-how, and research capacity?

Will the Philippines, a mineral-rich country, be allowed to position itself higher in the value chain rather than remain merely a source of raw minerals? Will our partners respect our sovereignty over strategic resources and our environmental standards?

A foreign semiconductor plant, data center, mineral-processing facility, or AI campus built on Philippine soil may appear like a reason to celebrate. But will Filipinos know how to design, manufacture, own, improve and export in the future that we are not capable of producing today?

Shared access, resilient supply chains, technological capability, and equitable prosperity. Could somebody find a better name that captures all of these?