By: Alexandra Brooks
On May 13, 2025, President Donald Trump stood before Saudi ministers, Gulf investors, and technology executives at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh and delivered what may be remembered as one of the defining foreign policy speeches of the decade. The event was written off as another investment forum; the speech was something else entirely.
In a single address, Trump warned Iran that its window for diplomacy was closing, announced a 142-billion-dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia, name‑checked Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and deals with Amazon, Oracle, AMD, and Qualcomm, and repeated his dream that Saudi Arabia would join the Abraham Accords. He sketched a Middle East that would “export technology, not terrorism.”
This piece argues that the continued engagement in the Middle East is not a series of isolated deals but the architecture of a new global order: the Abraham Accords as a Marshall Plan–style framework, Pax Silica and Nvidia‑backed AI “factories” as the infrastructure layer, and a dollar‑to‑digital system as the financial backbone. The strategy, taken together, is to embed partner states in an American‑led AI order, echoing how U.S. postwar initiatives like the Marshall Plan and related institutions underwrote Western Europe’s integration into the Bretton Woods order.
From George Marshall to Michael Kratsios
In June 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall delivered a commencement address at Harvard that reshaped the postwar world. The logic was simple but profound: political stability and peace depended on economic health, and economic health in a shattered Europe required support from American architecture: capital, institutional frameworks, and supply chains. The crucial line is often overlooked: “The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program.” The United States would lay the foundation; others would build on it.
The Marshall Plan did two things at once. It rebuilt allies. And it embedded them in an American‑led economic order, anchored by the Bretton Woods institutions and a dollar‑denominated financial system. The genius was that neither outcome required overt coercion. The deal was genuinely attractive. The dependency was structural rather than imposed. It laid the foundations for what Europeans themselves turned into the largest single market in the world and the most durable peace project in modern history: the European Union.
Bretton Woods and the Marshall Plan are best understood as twin pillars of the postwar U.S.‑led order: the first supplied the monetary and institutional architecture, negotiated in 1944; the second, launched in 1948, supplied the capital and political scaffolding that allowed Western Europe to operate inside it.
Now read Michael Kratsios in 2026, Trump’s former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, speaking at the India AI Impact Summit; “Real AI sovereignty means owning and using best-in-class technology for the benefit of your people, and charting your national destiny in the midst of global transformations. It does not mean waiting to participate in an AI-enabled global market until you have tried and failed to build full self-sufficiency. Complete technological self-containment is unrealistic for any country, because the AI stack is incredibly complex. But strategic autonomy alongside rapid AI adoption is achievable, and it is a necessity for independent nations. America wants to help.”
The Kratsios doctrine is already being operationalized. The American AI Export Program, which formally launched its first Call for Proposals on April 1, 2026, is designed—at least in ambition—to do for AI what the Marshall Plan did for Western Europe’s postwar recovery: turn American capabilities and templates into an exportable architecture for rebuilding key systems and binding willing partners into a U.S.‑anchored economic and technological order.
The American AI Export Program organizes consortia of U.S. firms to bring full‑stack AI solutions abroad — hardware optimized for AI, data pipelines and labeling, models, cybersecurity, and applications — rather than isolated products. In return, these consortia receive prioritized export licensing, diplomatic advocacy with foreign governments, and expedited federal financing channels.
The rhetorical DNA is the same almost 80 years later: the initiative comes from you; America provides the architecture. The currency has simply shifted from dollars and factories to compute, chips, models, and data infrastructure. The Marshall Plan paved the way for Western Europe to rebuild and to lock itself into the Bretton Woods architecture, turning American capital, rules, and institutions into the scaffolding of its recovery. The emerging American AI Export Program is the institutional bridge between that logic and today’s reality — a Marshall Plan for compute that packages U.S. capabilities into an exportable stack and embeds partner countries in an American AI order. In that sense, it is already rebuilding the world — starting with the Middle East — into a Pax Silica order.
The Diplomatic Chassis: Abraham Accords
When the Trump administration brokered normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab states, the Accords were ignored as nothing more than words on paper. Yet, beyond the diplomatic achievements themselves, the economic and technological dimension have been largely ignored. Israeli cybersecurity firms began collaborating with Emirati financial institutions. Agricultural technologies developed in the Negev found applications in Gulf states confronting similar water scarcity. The Accords were not just about security architecture against Tehran; they were about “positioning for an era when innovation, not oil, would define regional power.”
The Abraham Accords established a template: transactional normalization where the real currency was not only diplomatic recognition but economic and technological integration — what one analyst has viewed the evolution to “the silicon handshake,” peace through partnership through innovation. Critically, Iran served as the negative space that made the coalition coherent: the shared threat that gave disparate nations a common reason to align. As Anton Chekhov once remarked: “Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.”
The Infrastructure Layer: Pax Silica and AI “Factories”
In December 2025, Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg convened the first Pax Silica Summit in Washington, D.C. It is a curated, and growing, network of states chosen for their positions in the AI supply chain: chipmakers, cloud hosts, data hubs, and regional security partners. The declaration was explicit: “If the twentieth century ran on oil and steel, the twenty-first century runs on compute.”
Pax Silica is an attempt to reorganize global technological infrastructure around American‑controlled chokepoints — design, chip manufacturing, cloud platforms, security ecosystems — and in doing so to redefine alignment, sovereignty, and dependence in the AI age.
Abraham Accords states like the UAE, Qatar, and Israel emerged as founding Pax Silica partners. The Accords supplied the geopolitical skeleton; Pax Silica is laying the technological nervous system over it. What began as diplomatic normalization is evolving into a network of AI “factories,” data centers, and secure digital corridors stretching from the Mediterranean to the Gulf.
Seen against this backdrop, the 2025 Nvidia deals in the Gulf look less like opportunistic business and more like the material basis of the order. In May 2025, Nvidia and Saudi AI firm Humain announced a strategic partnership under which Nvidia would supply more than 18,000 of its top‑tier Blackwell‑class chips to power new “AI factories” in the kingdom. In parallel, the United States moved toward approving large‑scale Nvidia sales to the UAE, including a multiyear arrangement for high‑end AI chips subject to export controls and allocation between Emirati and U.S. cloud providers. Washington treated the Gulf as a destination for frontier AI infrastructure, while steering China toward constrained, export‑compliant chips or China‑specific variants.
AI hardware policy, in other words, became a tool of geopolitical alignment.
In March 2026, Washington put a financing mechanism behind the Pax Silica declaration. The State Department announced the Pax Silica Fund — $250 million in foreign assistance designed not as traditional grant aid but as a catalyst for private and sovereign capital estimated at more than a trillion dollars in assets under management among trusted partners. The Fund was explicitly framed as part of Secretary Rubio’s “Trade Not Aid” doctrine, targeting critical minerals, processing capacity, and manufacturing assets upstream of semiconductors.
The Security Lock‑In: Iran, Saudi, and the F‑35
Saudi Arabia has long been the missing piece of the Abraham Accords — courted, interested, but always conditional. Mohammed bin Salman’s conditions were never purely about Israel. They were about Iran. In the Saudi calculus, normalization with Israel was only possible once the regional threat that made such a move politically costly at home had been neutralized.
The war in Iran could be the catalyst for that neutralization, though it is too early to tell. Much to the American President’s dismay. On March 27, 2026, at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Miami, President Trump told Saudi delegates and Gulf executives that the conditions had been met. For nearly five decades, he said, Iran had been “the bully of the Middle East,” but now it was “on the run.” He recounted years of conversations in which the Crown Prince had responded to Abraham Accords overtures with a list of prerequisites. Turning to Yasir Al‑Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, he made the ask public: “I hope you’re going to be getting into the Abraham Accords finally. Will you please go back and explain? It’s time now.”
The Miami speech also revealed something subtler than a simple pivot away from Europe. Trump’s frustration with NATO’s response to the Iran conflict was explicit — “you learn who your friends are,” he told the room. Yet he did not call for NATO’s dissolution, and he went out of his way to praise Turkey, a NATO member, echoing language from his earlier Riyadh remarks in 2025. The signal was not a clean break from Europe toward the Gulf. It was a reweighting inside an existing architecture: Gulf partners, Israel, and select European states becoming the critical nodes of a new AI‑and‑defense order.
Greece is a key test case in how this strategy scales beyond the Middle East. Athens is a Pax Silica signatory, has moved aggressively into American AI partnerships including deep engagement with OpenAI, and sits inside both NATO and the emerging compute architecture. Its relations with Turkey remain fraught — yet both countries are being courted, through different channels, as nodes in the new order. If the Abraham Accords model is a template for technological and security integration rather than a purely Middle Eastern diplomatic instrument (as signaled in the Miami Speech by President Trump), Greece and Turkey together may represent exactly the kind of bridging path Europe needs: ways into Pax Silica that do not require choosing between the Atlantic alliance and the emerging American AI order. The question is not whether Europe is left behind. It is whether its entry points are being quietly built — and whether anyone in Brussels is paying attention to where the doors are.
At the same Miami summit, Trump announced that the United States had agreed, for the first time, to sell Saudi Arabia the F‑35, America’s most advanced fighter jet. For years, that sale had been withheld in part to protect Israel’s qualitative military edge. Its approval now, in the context of the war, signals that the alliance architecture has shifted enough that old constraints no longer apply. Saudi Arabia is being brought fully inside — not just as an investment partner or AI customer, but as a peer defense partner with access to some of America’s most sensitive military technology.
Seen together, the Iran campaign, the Abraham Accords, the AI export program, and F‑35 access form the security spine of the new order.
The Monetary Backbone: From Bretton Woods to Digital Dollars
The Marshall Plan world was anchored by Bretton Woods and the dollar’s role as global reserve currency, supported by U.S. military power and institutional credibility. The question for the Abraham Accords and Pax Silica era is what plays that role now.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent helps sketch an answer. In a recent address, he argued that industrial capacity, technological leadership, and a strong‑dollar policy together form the backbone of U.S. economic sovereignty. He then singled out stablecoins — dollar‑denominated digital currencies — as a mechanism for reinforcing the dollar’s global role and extending its network effects into emerging digital payment systems. The GENIUS Act’s regulatory framework is, in part, a preemptive strike against a widely adopted Chinese digital currency that would operate outside U.S. law and erode American monetary leverage. In this telling, dollar stablecoins are Bretton Woods for the machine age.
The loop closes further when you consider where AI itself is heading. As Galaxy Digital’s Michael Novogratz has observed, in the near future the largest users of stablecoins may not be humans at all, but autonomous AI agents paying one another for compute, data, and services. If the world’s AI runs on American infrastructure and settles its transactions in dollar‑denominated digital money, U.S. monetary primacy is not merely preserved in the AI era. It is hard‑wired into it.
What Does It All Mean
Put together, the pieces are an interconnected strategy:
- The Abraham Accords as a Marshall Plan–style framework for binding partners into a common project.
- Pax Silica,Nvidia‑backed AI “factories” and a Pax Silica Fund as the compute and cloud stack that operationalizes that framework.
- F‑35 sales, integrated air defense, and Iran containment as the hard‑power spine of the architecture.
- Dollar‑denominated stablecoins and, eventually, AI‑driven digital payments as the monetary substrate that backs and extends it.
Together, they amount to a nascent global order that runs on AI infrastructure and dollar‑linked digital rails, offered to partners who are told — as Europe was told in 1947 — that the initiative must come from them, and that America stands ready with “friendly aid” in drafting the program.
Trump said it plainly in Riyadh in 2025: “We will work together. We will be together. We will succeed together. We will win together.”
The architecture is being written now, and it has multiple doors: the American AI export program, the Abraham Accords, Pax Silica, the emerging stablecoin rails. A new world order is taking shape, and if history is any guide, the countries that shape it will not be the ones who waited to understand it. The Middle East and emerging technology are where the map is being drawn. The question is who picks up a pen.