Diplomacy & Crisis News

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New Delhi’s presidency offers significant opportunities – yet also unavoidable challenges – at a moment when the very idea of multilateralism is under strain.

Murray Hunter says that the alternative – a possible two-year prison sentence – left him with little choice.

Or risk losing a global swing state.

The massive costs of gutting USAID.

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The new deal will support the implementation of the two nations' Reciprocal Access Agreement, which came into force in September.

The administration's new National Security Strategy has pushed the U.S. policy toward the island in a decidedly dangerous direction.

Australia unveiled its plan for a critical mineral reserve ahead of a G-7 plus meeting.

The pro-Kremlin TV commentator Vladimir Solovyov's latest remarks framing Central Asia as Russia’s “sphere of interest” and calling the region “our Asia” sparked a strong public response.

Despite presidential pledges to expand opportunities for the development of parties, Kazakhs seeking to register new political parties are more often than not rejected, repeatedly. 

As frictions mount with each other, both Beijing and Tokyo are courting Seoul.

At the edge of Davos, the 19th-century church-turned-‘USA House’ seems to be the architectural epitome of Weberian ethics and American techno-capitalism (Source: Financial Times)

The White House’s confirmation that President Donald J. Trump will attend the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2026 instantly reframed the meeting’s stakes. Davos has long been caricatured as a champagne-soaked conclave of globalist elites—precisely the kind of venue Trump once mocked. Yet his return is neither ironic nor accidental. According to the Observer, Trump now openly eyes a “U.S. conquest of Davos,” using the forum to sell American capitalism back to the very elites who once dismissed it as politically toxic.

This is not Trump’s first Davos gambit. In a virtual 2025 address to the World Economic Forum, Trump delivered a blunt carrot‑and‑stick message to global business leaders: bring production and investment to American soil or face tariffs on goods sold into the U.S. market. He promised lower corporate taxes and regulatory certainty for companies that manufacture in the United States, while warning that those that did not would “very simply… have to pay a tariff” on their exports—potentially generating hundreds of billions of dollars to strengthen the U.S. economy and reduce debt.

Davos 2026, however, will be about more than tariffs. Backed by corporate heavyweights such as Microsoft and McKinsey—each reportedly pledging up to $1 million to support the US Davos hub—the United States is set to stage a precise and confident showcase of its economic and technological clout. Most events will unfold in a 19th‑century English church just outside the forum’s security perimeter, reimagined as “USA House” and adorned with imagery celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Its chosen themes—“peace through strength,” “digital assets & economic resilience,” and “faith‑based initiatives”—reflect a blend of economic patriotism and techno‑pragmatism, crafted to underline America’s central role in shaping the twenty‑first‑century order. Within this carefully choreographed setting, Trump’s appearance could fuse a revived American capitalist narrative with an emerging club-based techno‑geopolitical initiative called Pax Silica—turning Davos into a stage for a new convergence of power, capital, and innovation.

(Source: US Department of State)

What Is Pax Silica?

Formally launched by the U.S. State Department on December 12, 2025, through the adoption of the Pax Silica Declaration, the initiative brings together a core group of U.S. allies and trusted partners—including the United Kingdom, Singapore, Israel, and the Netherlands—around a shared set of mission values: securing supply chains, protecting sensitive technologies, and building collective resilience against coercive or non-market practices. Pax Silica builds directly on earlier U.S. industrial policy, most notably the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors(CHIPS) and Science Act of 2022, while extending those domestic commitments into a coordinated diplomatic framework. By embedding industrial policy within alliance coordination, it seeks to align private capital, public regulation, and strategic planning across borders, transforming what were once national initiatives into a shared geopolitical architecture.

Within Pax Silica, participation is not defined by ideological alignment, but by adherence to common standards governing compute infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing, energy reliability, and critical minerals sourcing. In this regulatory- and incentive-based sense, the framework operates as a selective coordination mechanism, privileging those both willing and able to meet its governance and security thresholds. From this politico-economically selective base, Pax Silica articulates ambitions that extend beyond immediate supply-chain risk mitigation. As artificial intelligence consolidates its role as a general-purpose technology, the framework treats sustained control over the full technology stack—not only algorithms, but hardware, energy, and upstream inputs—as the foundation of future economic power. Its enduring objective is therefore neither wholesale decoupling nor indiscriminate reshoring, but a rules-based reordering of global production that channels investment, innovation, and growth through trusted networks capable of sustaining competitiveness and security over time.

The implications for Davos 2026 follow naturally. Pax Silica’s appeal lies in its club-based logic: privileged access to advanced innovation ecosystems, capital markets, and technology platforms for those inside the framework, paired with rising frictions and exclusion risks for those outside it. In this light, the initiative functions less as a formal alliance than as the organizing backdrop for debates over tariffs, reshoring, and AI leadership—precisely the terrain on which Trump’s return to Davos is likely to unfold.

Could Davos 2026 Herald the New Start of Trumpian Expansionary(Scalable) Club Diplomacy?

Davos 2026 convenes under the banner of “A Spirit of Dialogue,” yet its underlying imperative is sharply pragmatic: sustaining growth and trust as compute capacity and strategic supply chains increasingly function as instruments of state power. Within this environment, Pax Silica may emerge not merely as a discrete policy agenda, but as the principal institutional lens through which the global tech‑industrial divide is interpreted. By lowering coordination costs and harmonizing standards, its club‑based logic aims to expand participation over time—quietly furnishing a strategic framework that could, in turn, shape the context of Trump’s return.

As AI shifts from experimentation to scaled deployment, decisions involving compute capacity, data‑center siting, and energy infrastructure now dictate both national competitiveness and corporate valuation. Consequently, at Davos 2026, AI represents the central axis along which growth, capital allocation, and strategic dependence converge—precisely the set of issues poised to dominate the discussions among executives, investors, and policymakers.

For Trump, AI thus constitutes the most pragmatic policy lever. When filtered through Pax Silica’s logic of scalability, strategic leverage concentrates upstream—across compute, platforms, energy, and ecosystem governance—the very domains Pax Silica seeks to standardize among trusted networks. Given U.S. primacy in frontier models and cloud infrastructure, the Trumpian approach is likely to be integrative rather than coercive: aligning AI investment, infrastructure build‑out, and regulatory expectations within a shared framework that broadens participation while anchoring it in U.S.‑centered technological norms.

Under these conditions—and driven by the urgency of scaling AI governance among like‑minded partners—Davos 2026, when accompanied by Pax Silica‑themed events, is poised to act less as a forum for persuasion than one for consolidation. Within this elite nexus, asymmetric technological advantages can be translated into durable commitments—joint ventures, shared infrastructures, and long‑term partnerships—rooted in an American‑centered AI stack. Ultimately, Trump’s presence would amplify this dynamic, positioning Pax Silica as an emergent paradigm through which technological preeminence matures into enduring economic cohesion.

Manus tried to reframe its identity through “Singapore washing” – but as algorithms transform into key national assets, such maneuvers no longer work.

Islamabad is no longer content to rely on diplomacy alone to safeguard its security interests. 

Tokyo has earned political trust in the region through its quiet, yet long-standing, economic cooperation.

The landscape for migrant work in Taiwan seems set to change in the near future.