Pax Silica

The war over Iran and the trade deals with Ecuador are not separate stories. One is the military instrument. The other is the administrative one. Both are expressions of the same drive.

Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.

---

“Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace (ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant).”

Tacitus, Agricola, chapter 30 (trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb).

Within hours of the first US and Israeli strikes on Iranian military facilities, Brent crude surged 10 to 13 percent. Over the course of March, as Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to all non-allied traffic, it climbed 59 percent — the steepest monthly rise since records began in 1988, exceeding the gains of the first Gulf War. Shipping insurance rates for vessels transiting the Persian Gulf doubled overnight. Within a week, as Iran announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to all non-allied traffic, the disruption ceased to be a market event and became a structural one. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply moves through that strait. It stopped moving. The consequences for British households, already carrying the weight of years of energy price inflation, were immediate and unambiguous.

What kept returning was not any specific parallel but a structure. Israel and the United States had already hit the nuclear sites, months before Operation Epic Fury began. The capability was gone, or the briefings said it was gone. So when the bombs started falling on 28 February I kept asking the same question I had asked in 2003, not about the weapons this time but about their absence. In 2003 the weapons did not exist. This time they had been destroyed before the war started. The pretext had been formally closed. The war happened anyway, larger, more sustained, with consequences for energy markets and British households that nobody in the mainstream coverage was connecting to anything structural. I had read the trade documents before the strikes began. Going back to them after 28 February, the connection I had not quite made became visible. The war and the fine print were the same operation.

This is the visible face of what William I. Robinson calls the epochal crisis: the moment when the contradictions of global capitalism become impossible to manage through ordinary means, and the hegemonic bloc that controls the system reaches for its most direct instruments. Robinson, whose analysis of the transnational capitalist class has shaped much of my understanding of the current conjuncture, argues that we are living through the emergence of a new hegemonic fraction of capital, one that brings together big tech, transnational finance, and the military-repression complex in an overlapping, mutually reinforcing bloc. This bloc does not use Donald Trump. It operates through him, as it operates through the trade negotiators, the Pentagon procurement officers, and the bilateral framework agreements that nobody reads. The war over Iran’s nuclear programme and the regional order of the Middle East is one expression of this bloc’s drive. The trade deals are another. They are not separate stories.

To see why, it is necessary to read the fine print.

On 13 November 2025, the White House published a fact sheet announcing a trade framework with Ecuador. The headline was tariffs: relief from the levies Trump had imposed in April, the so-called Liberation Day package that had threatened Ecuador’s exports with duties of up to 15 percent. The press release ran to several hundred words. Buried in the digital trade section was this: Ecuador had committed to not imposing digital service taxes that discriminate against US companies, and to supporting a permanent moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions at the World Trade Organisation.

A digital services tax is how a country without a significant physical presence from a tech company can still require that company to pay tax on the revenue it extracts from that country’s users. France tried it. The EU tried it. Developing countries have been moving toward it for years, precisely because Google, Amazon, and Meta generate enormous revenues in their jurisdictions while routing profits elsewhere through transfer pricing arrangements that leave local tax authorities with nothing. The WTO moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions, in place since 1998 and perpetually renewed under pressure from Washington, prevents countries from treating digital products as taxable imports. Making it permanent locks that arrangement in. Ecuador, in exchange for tariff relief on its physical exports, agreed to surrender two of the most significant regulatory tools available to a small economy trying to extract value from the platforms that extract value from it.

Ecuador is not alone. The Indonesia deal, announced in July 2025, required Jakarta to eliminate tariffs and import requirements on digital products, provide certainty for cross-border data transfers to the United States, and support the same permanent WTO moratorium. The data transfer clause provoked immediate controversy inside Indonesia. An Indonesian NGO noted that US surveillance powers under FISA 702 could expose Indonesians’ data without Jakarta’s consent, the same vulnerability that collapsed the EU-US Privacy Shield arrangement in 2020. The Business Software Alliance, a lobby group whose members include Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, celebrated the Indonesia deal as a breakthrough. The Computer and Communications Industry Association called it a significant win for US digital services. Neither organisation mentioned tariffs as the subject of their interest, because tariffs were not the subject of their interest.

The same conditions appear in the framework agreements with Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala, all announced in November 2025. Public Citizen, the US consumer advocacy group, reviewed the pattern and named it plainly: the Trump administration had advanced Big Tech’s global agenda through tariff coercion, forcing countries to surrender their capacity to tax and regulate American platforms in exchange for relief from duties that served no coherent economic purpose in the first place. The concessions were real. The relief was conditional, partial, and legally precarious.

In February 2026, the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs, the legal instrument through which Liberation Day was imposed, as as exceeding the President’s statutory authority. The tariff threat dissolved. The digital deregulation commitments remained. Ecuador still will not tax Google. Indonesia still transfers data under adequacy rules written to American standards. The coercion worked, and then the coercion became unnecessary, because the architecture it extracted was already in place.

Jacob Helberg, Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, has given this architecture a name and a legal form. On 12 December 2025, at a summit held at the newly rebranded Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, Helberg convened representatives from Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Israel, and the United Kingdom to sign the Pax Silica Declaration. The founding document states its purpose plainly: compute¹, silicon, critical minerals, and energy are now to be treated as shared strategic assets among aligned nations. Helberg’s own gloss on the declaration, delivered in his official capacity, was this: if the twentieth century ran on oil and steel, the twenty-first runs on compute and the minerals that feed it.

Pax Romana was not peace. It was the pacification of resistance. What Rome administered in the provinces was not a settlement between equals but a system of extraction: tax obligations enforced by military presence, local legal autonomy progressively replaced by Roman administrative law, monetary systems subordinated to Roman currency, infrastructure built to serve Roman logistics rather than provincial need. The roads went to Rome. Tacitus, writing in the voice of the British chieftain Calgacus facing Roman legions, gave the system its most precise description: they make a wasteland and call it peace. The conquered were not destroyed. They were integrated, administered, and drained.

Pax Silica works the same way, translated into the twenty-first century and the architecture of the digital economy. The trade deals are the provincial governance of this system. Ecuador and Indonesia do not lose their governments. They retain their flags, their presidents, their parliaments. What they surrender is the capacity to tax the platforms that extract value from their populations, the capacity to govern the data flows that cross their borders, and the capacity to build domestic digital sectors that might one day compete with the corporations now embedded in their infrastructure. The roads, in this case, are the subsea cables, the satellite networks, the data centres and GPU clusters being installed in allied states under investment agreements that the host country does not control and cannot easily remove. Starlink already demonstrated what control of that infrastructure means in practice. In early 2025, US negotiators told Kyiv it faced imminent loss of Starlink access if it refused to sign a critical minerals deal. Musk denied the threat publicly. The dependency was real regardless. Ukraine’s entire front line, Musk himself acknowledged, would collapse without the signal.

The British case makes the imperial logic visible in a context closer to home. We were not threatened with Liberation Day tariffs in the same direct way as Ecuador or Indonesia. Keir Starmer’s government went willingly, signing a Technology Prosperity Deal in September 2025 worth £31 billion in commitments from Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI. Microsoft alone committed £22 billion, including the construction of Britain’s largest AI supercomputer in Loughton, Essex. No gun was visible. What the suspension of that deal in December 2025 revealed, however, is that willing compliance and coerced compliance produce identical results. Washington halted the agreement because Britain had not surrendered its Digital Services Tax, its Online Safety Act, and certain food safety standards blocking American agricultural exports. The leverage was investment rather than tariffs, but the demand was the same: remove the regulatory obstacles to American platform capital or the deal does not proceed. Britain’s former chief data officer warned that we risked laying the foundations of other countries’ successful technologies. Starmer’s growth strategy, built on attracting US tech investment, turned out to be structurally conditional on Britain not regulating American platforms. That Britain arrived at this position without visible coercion makes it the more instructive case, not the less. A province that surrenders voluntarily costs less to administer.

Whether the coordination behind this pattern is explicit or emergent from structural interest is a question the documents cannot answer. What the documents show is convergence of outcome. Wherever the bloc’s instruments have been applied, whether through tariff threats in Latin America, investment leverage in Britain, or aerial bombardment in the Middle East, the result is the elimination of obstacles to accumulation. In Iran, the obstacle is a state that controls significant energy resources and refuses integration into the dollar-denominated order. In Ecuador, the obstacle is a tax law. The scale is different. The logic is identical. Robinson’s framework names what is otherwise invisible in each individual case: these are not separate policy decisions but expressions of a single expansionary drive, conducted simultaneously, through whichever instrument the situation permits.

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed to most shipping. Trump says Iran has 48 hours to open it. The fine print is long signed. The supercomputer is still being built in Essex. Pax Silica is here. It is being installed, clause by clause, investment by investment, and where necessary, strike by strike.

“I don’t need international law. My own morality. My own mind. That’s the only thing that can stop me.”

President Donald J. Trump

---

---

Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.

1. Compute is the processing power that trains and runs AI systems, the new oil in the sense that whoever controls its infrastructure controls the economy built on top of it.