In a recent piece I published on Defense.info, I argued that what changes most profoundly in a genuinely epochal transition is not the answers societies hold, but the questions they consider worth asking. The analyst who clings to the old question-space does not simply get wrong answers. He asks questions that are increasingly beside the point, technically competent, intellectually coherent, and operationally irrelevant.
Alexandra Brooks’ essay, “The Interconnected Deals No One Is Calling a New World Order,” is a striking demonstration of what it looks like when an analyst actually inhabits the new question-space rather than the old one.
Most of the commentary surrounding American engagement in the Middle East has continued to ask Cold War-derived and post-Cold War questions: Is this deal good for Israel’s qualitative military edge? Does the Abraham Accords framework hold? What does the Iran campaign mean for regional stability? Is Trump’s diplomatic style sustainable? These are not meaningless questions. But they are, increasingly, the wrong ones.
Brooks asks different questions entirely. She asks: What is the architectural logic that connects an arms deal, an AI chip sale, a stablecoin regulatory framework, and a normalization agreement? What is the institutional scaffolding being built, and for what purpose? Who is being embedded in what order, and on what terms?
Those are the questions the emerging strategic environment is actually posing.
From Kuhn to Kratsios
In my Defense.info piece, I drew on Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of paradigm shifts to make a specific point: a paradigm does not just answer questions, it generates them. It tells practitioners what phenomena deserve attention and what anomalies can be safely ignored. The deeper transformation in a genuine paradigm shift is not the replacement of one answer with a better one. It is the reorganization of the problem space itself.
Brooks’ essay demonstrates this reorganization in practice.
The question “Is the Abraham Accords framework holding?” belongs to one problem space — the post-Cold War framework of formal diplomatic normalization, state recognition, and multilateral institution-building. The question Brooks is asking — “Is the Abraham Accords framework functioning as the diplomatic chassis of a new U.S.-led technological order?” — belongs to an entirely different one.
The first question fits neatly into the inherited conceptual architecture of Middle East diplomacy as practiced since Oslo. The second question treats the Accords as something closer to what the Marshall Plan was: not an end state, but a binding mechanism. A framework for embedding willing partners in an American-anchored order before that order fully crystallizes.
Michael Kratsios, speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in 2026, provided what Brooks rightly identifies as the rhetorical DNA of this new architecture: “Real AI sovereignty means owning and using best-in-class technology for the benefit of your people… Complete technological self-containment is unrealistic for any country… America wants to help.” The syntax is almost identical to George Marshall’s 1947 Harvard address: the initiative must come from you; the United States provides the architecture.
The currency has shifted from dollars and industrial capacity to compute, chips, models, and data infrastructure. But the logic of structural embedding — making dependency attractive rather than imposed — is precisely the same.
The Epistemic Architecture of the New Order
Foucault’s concept of the episteme — the underlying structure that defines what can be known, said, and thought within a given epoch — is useful here in a way that is concrete rather than merely theoretical.
The episteme of the post-Cold War liberal international order made certain questions thinkable: How do we support democratization? How do we manage failed states? How do we sustain norm diffusion through multilateral institutions? It made other questions marginal or simply invisible. Questions about the strategic implications of AI infrastructure, about the geopolitical consequences of chip allocation policy, about the relationship between stablecoin regulatory frameworks and dollar primacy in a machine-age payment system — these did not register as primary strategic questions within the post-Cold War framework.
They are registering now. And Brooks is asking them.
Her analysis of Pax Silica is particularly useful as an illustration of this shift. The Pax Silica initiative, convened by Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg in December 2025, is explicitly organized around what the post-Cold War framework could not even recognize as a strategic variable: control of the AI supply chain’s chokepoints — design, chip manufacturing, cloud platforms, security ecosystems. The question it poses is not “How do we build multilateral institutions for norm diffusion?” It is “How do we organize global technological infrastructure around American-controlled architectural nodes, and which partners do we embed in that architecture first?”
That is a genuinely new question. It belongs to a different episteme than the one that produced the post-Cold War liberal order’s analytical vocabulary.
The Security Spine and the Monetary Substrate
Brooks connects three elements that post-Cold War analysis would have treated as separate analytical domains: the security architecture (Iran containment, F-35 sales, integrated air defense), the technological infrastructure (Pax Silica, Nvidia chip deals, AI factories), and the monetary substrate (dollar-denominated stablecoins, the GENIUS Act, digital payment rails).
The post-Cold War framework kept these domains largely separate. Security analysts analyzed security. Economists analyzed monetary systems. Technology analysts analyzed technology. The institutional architecture of think tanks, government agencies, and academic disciplines reflected this separation.
What Brooks is identifying is that the emerging order is being built precisely at the intersection of these domains — and that the most important strategic questions are therefore questions about the architectural logic that connects them, not questions confined to any single domain.
The F-35 sale to Saudi Arabia, for instance, is not simply a security story about Israel’s qualitative military edge. It is a node in a broader architecture: a partner being brought fully inside the order — not just as an investment partner or AI customer, but as a peer defense partner. The chip sales to Gulf AI factories are not simply technology or business stories. They are the material basis of Pax Silica alignment: hardware policy as geopolitical signal. And the stablecoin framework is not simply a financial regulation story. It is, as Treasury Secretary Bessent’s framing suggests, Bretton Woods for the machine age — a preemptive move to hard-wire dollar primacy into the infrastructure of AI-driven digital payments before that infrastructure is set.
The new question-space demands analysis that moves across these domains, tracing the architectural logic rather than analyzing each node in isolation.
The Indo-Pacific Parallel
In my Defense.info piece, I identified the Indo-Pacific theater as the most consequential arena in which the transition between question-spaces is being worked out. The questions that organized U.S. strategy in the Pacific for the first generation after the Cold War, about access, forward presence, and conventional deterrence of a relatively linear Chinese military threat, are being overtaken by a different problem space shaped by anti-access/area-denial capabilities, precision strike proliferation, and the challenge of sustaining allied cohesion across a dispersed theater.
Brooks’ analysis of the Middle East suggests a parallel transformation, though its logic is somewhat different. In the Indo-Pacific, the new question-space is primarily organized around military and operational challenges. In the Middle East, the new question-space is organized around the architecture of a new order being actively constructed — the Abraham Accords as diplomatic chassis, Pax Silica as technological nervous system, stablecoin rails as monetary substrate.
The two theaters are connected. The same AI infrastructure questions that are reshaping Indo-Pacific strategy about the integration of commercial and military technology, about the strategic implications of chip allocation, about the relationship between technological leadership and alliance coherence — are central to what is being built in the Gulf. The difference is that in the Middle East, the construction is more explicit and the architectural logic more visible.
What the New Questions Demand
My argument in the Defense.info piece was that the task for strategic analysts in an age of epochal transition is not simply to find better answers to the questions the previous era posed. It is to develop the conceptual discipline to inhabit the new question-space, to ask, with rigor and without nostalgia, what the emerging strategic environment is actually demanding.
Brooks’ essay demonstrates what that discipline looks like in practice. It does not ask whether Trump’s diplomatic style is sustainable. It asks what architecture is being built under the noise of his style. It does not ask whether any single deal is good or bad on its own terms. It asks what system the deals collectively constitute. It does not treat the Abraham Accords, Pax Silica, chip sales, and stablecoin regulation as separate phenomena to be analyzed in separate analytical silos. It asks what the connective logic is.
These are the questions the new strategic environment is actually posing.
The countries that shape the emerging order, as Brooks observes, will not be the ones who waited to understand it. The same is true of analysts. The organizations, institutions, and individuals who will produce strategically useful analysis in the period ahead are not the ones who answer the old questions most competently. They are the ones who recognize that the question-space itself has shifted and who have the intellectual discipline to ask the questions the new reality is actually demanding.
That recognition is not comfortable. As I argued in my Defense.info piece, institutions built around the old question-space resist it. Professional incentives favor incremental refinement over genuine reconceptualization. The analyst who says “we are asking the wrong questions” is always at risk of being dismissed as a philosopher when what the institution wants is an operator.
But the history of strategic failure is largely a history of institutions that answered the old questions very well while the operational reality had already moved on.
Brooks is asking the new questions. That is the more important point about her essay, not whether every element of her analysis is settled or her conclusions definitive, but that she has correctly identified the problem space the emerging environment is actually presenting.
That is where the analytical work of this moment has to begin.
The Interconnected Deals No One Is Calling a New World Order