U.S. Drafts ‘Pick-a-Side’ Letter on AI Blocs: Pax Silica vs. WAICO

Washington’s ultimatum echoes the 1949–1994 CoCom export-control regime, when the U.S. forced NATO allies to restrict high-tech sales to the Soviet bloc; once again, technology chokepoints (then numerically-controlled machine tools, now GPUs and lithography gear) become levers of alliance discipline. The letter also resurrects the binary-camp logic that the 1955 Bandung Conference and later Non-Aligned Movement tried to escape, suggesting a reversal of three decades of post-Cold-War economic interdependence. Longer-term, the move signals that advanced compute is being codified as a strategic commodity like oil in 1908 or uranium in 1945—governance is shifting from multilateral standards bodies to rival politico-industrial cartels. Whether this moment endures hinges on two uncertainties: (1) if open-source AI and alternative chip architectures erode U.S. chokepoints, much as cheap Soviet oil undercut the 1973 embargo, the ultimatum may age poorly; (2) if nations such as Brazil or India coalesce a third, non-aligned AI corridor, the forced-choice framework could fracture. Either way, historians looking back a century will likely mark 2025-26 as the period when access to ‘compute’ overtook hydrocarbons as the premier currency of geopolitical power.