When Sergio Gor stepped onto the steps of the United States Embassy in New Delhi on 12 January 2026, months before formally presenting his credentials to President Droupadi Murmu, he did not merely deliver an arrival speech. He executed what international lawyers would recognise as a juridical act of signalling. His announcement that India would be invited to join the United States led Pax Silica initiative marks a structural shift in how power, technology, trade and security are to be organised in the twenty first century.
The invitation of India into an eight nation strategic technology bloc originally comprising Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Australia is not a ceremonial enlargement. It is the legal consolidation of a new category of alliance, one that sits uneasily between trade agreement, security pact and technology governance regime. Pax Silica is not NATO. It is not the World Trade Organization. It is not a free trade agreement. Yet it borrows coercive force from all three.
At its core lies a proposition that is legally revolutionary and geopolitically destabilising: that silicon, data processing capacity, semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence infrastructure constitute strategic assets equivalent to oil, sea lanes and nuclear materials.
From a public international law perspective, this represents a quiet redefinition of what constitutes essential national security infrastructure under Article XXI of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. For decades, states relied on this exception to justify protectionism in defence sectors. Pax Silica extends the doctrine to chips, cloud computing and algorithmic capability.
The initiative explicitly aims to reduce what the United States State Department describes as coercive dependencies. This language is not accidental. It mirrors the jurisprudence of economic coercion developed in cases before the International Court of Justice such as Nicaragua v United States and more recently referenced in advisory opinions on sanctions regimes. In practical terms, Pax Silica is a legal architecture for exclusion. It formalises a technological iron curtain.
India’s admission, therefore, is not merely a diplomatic compliment. It is a demand for legal realignment.
The delayed trade agreement between Washington and New Delhi provides the first evidence of the cost of that alignment. Since the Trump administration imposed fifty percent tariffs on a wide range of Indian goods, negotiations have limped through six formal rounds and three ministerial visits. These tariffs are prima facie inconsistent with the most favoured nation principle under Article I of GATT and the tariff binding obligations under Article II. The United States justifies them under national security exceptions, an increasingly abused provision that has already eroded the credibility of multilateral trade law.
If India joins Pax Silica, the trade negotiations cease to be a commercial dispute. They become the legal entry fee to a closed technology club.
Sergio Gor’s remarks that India is not an easy nation to bring across the finish line were diplomatically polite but legally revealing. India’s domestic regulatory structure on data localisation under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, its production linked incentive schemes for semiconductor fabrication, its restrictions on foreign ownership in critical infrastructure, and its long standing oil trade with Russia all place it in tension with the logic of Pax Silica.
Membership would require harmonisation of export controls with United States regulations such as the Export Administration Regulations and the Foreign Direct Product Rule. It would require compliance with semiconductor equipment restrictions targeting Chinese foundries. It would likely entail limitations on technology cooperation with Russian and Iranian entities under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.
This is not diplomacy. It is legal re engineering of sovereignty.
Gor’s repeated invocation of personal relationships between President Trump and Prime Minister Modi attempts to soften what is structurally a coercive alignment strategy. Friendship in international law has no binding force. Treaties do.
What is emerging is a system of technological treaty blocs operating parallel to formal multilateral institutions. The World Trade Organization dispute settlement system is functionally paralysed. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development lacks enforcement power. Into this vacuum step initiatives like Pax Silica, operating through executive agreements, regulatory convergence and sanctions harmonisation.
The risk is not theoretical. Once supply chains become militarised through legal instruments, commercial disputes become security incidents. A restriction on chip exports becomes an act of strategic containment. A breach of technology sharing rules becomes a threat to national survival.
History offers a clear warning. The Anglo German naval agreements before the First World War were framed as stabilising mechanisms. They became triggers. The oil embargoes of the nineteen seventies reshaped Middle Eastern geopolitics for half a century. The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls during the Cold War institutionalised technological segregation that hardened ideological blocs.
Pax Silica follows this lineage.
India’s earlier exclusion from the initiative, and the domestic political backlash that followed, already demonstrated the internal legal pressure such blocs generate. Parliamentary sovereignty becomes hostage to access to foreign technology. Regulatory independence is traded for inclusion.
Even Gor’s casual references to India as the largest nation and to the worlds oldest and largest democracies mask a deeper legal contradiction. Pax Silica operates outside democratic oversight. Its rules will be negotiated by executive branches, implemented through administrative regulations, enforced through sanctions, and shielded from judicial review under doctrines of foreign affairs deference.
The trade negotiations he referenced will likely incorporate intellectual property enforcement obligations beyond those required by the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. Data transfer rules may collide with Indias constitutional jurisprudence on privacy established in Justice K S Puttaswamy v Union of India. National security exemptions will expand until they swallow the rule.
The irony is that this is occurring under the rhetorical banner of de risking.
In reality, the world is moving towards legal fragmentation of technology ecosystems. Chinese standards bodies are already building parallel frameworks for fifth generation networks, artificial intelligence governance and semiconductor certification. The European Union is asserting digital sovereignty through the Digital Markets Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act. Russia is constructing sovereign internet architecture.
Pax Silica is the American answer.
Sergio Gor’s speech therefore should be read not as optimism but as notice. India is being offered a seat in a legal order where technology is regulated like weapons, trade is subordinated to security, and diplomatic disagreement is penalised through access denial to foundational infrastructure.
This carries consequences far beyond tariffs.
Once integrated, India would face treaty level expectations to align its foreign policy. Continued energy purchases from Russia could trigger secondary sanctions. Technology cooperation with non aligned states could be restricted. Domestic firms could be barred from global supply chains for regulatory non conformity.
International law offers limited protection. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter enshrines sovereign equality. Article 51 recognises self defence. But economic warfare operates below the threshold of armed conflict. The law of state responsibility is ill equipped to address algorithmic exclusion and semiconductor embargoes.
Gor’s assertion that real friends resolve disagreements is legally hollow. Trade law resolves disagreements. Security law escalates them.
The timing of Pax Silica is no accident. It coincides with accelerating United States China decoupling, renewed sanctions regimes against Russia, growing instability in the Middle East and the weaponisation of supply chains following the pandemic era shortages. It also coincides with the erosion of faith in multilateralism.
India now stands at a junction between strategic autonomy and technological dependence.
Accepting the invitation will reshape its domestic regulatory law, its foreign investment regime, its energy policy and its diplomatic posture. Rejecting it risks marginalisation from advanced semiconductor ecosystems essential for defence, health care, space technology and artificial intelligence.
There is no neutral path.
Sergio Gor’s arrival speech was framed as friendship. In legal terms, it was closer to an offer of accession to a new order whose rules are still being written, whose enforcement will be selective, and whose consequences will be irreversible.
Pax Silica is not a supply chain initiative. It is the constitutional charter of a new technological empire.
India is being asked to sign it without seeing the full text.
And the world should pay attention, because this is how future wars will be written. Not in declarations. But in export controls, standards committees, trade negotiations and invitations delivered from embassy steps.