A new term is likely to enter not only the vocabulary of artificial intelligence but also that of international relations, where AI is becoming an increasingly central factor: Tokenpolitik.
The concept appears in an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), authored by Benjamin Jensen, Director of the Futures Lab and Senior Fellow in the Defense and Security Department, and Yasir Atalan, Deputy Director and Data Fellow at the same lab.
**A New Strategic Concept. **Their argument is straightforward: the United States needs a new grand strategic vision capable of coordinating government agencies, allies and the private sector to compete with China in building the global AI infrastructure.
- “As the authors write, “The United States needs tokenpolitik: a grand strategy connecting State, Commerce, Treasury, DFC, EXIM, allied governments, and private firms to make secure, affordable AI capacity available to strategic partners.”
**Why Tokens Matter. **The underlying idea is not entirely new. At its core lies the concept of an ecosystem, applied to AI in its broadest sense. It all begins with a technical but fundamental element: tokens.
Tokens are the basic unitsthrough which artificial intelligence models process information. Every prompt submitted to a chatbot, every generated text and every analysed image is broken down into tokens, which are converted into mathematical representations that neural networks can process.- The faster and more efficiently a system can generate and process tokens, the lower its cost per token and the greater its competitiveness.
- Today’s leading AI models compete not only on the quality of their outputs, but also on inference costs and their ability to scale across billions of requests.
**Beyond Algorithms: The Infrastructure Race. **Behind those tokens, however, lies far more than software. Advanced semiconductors, data centres, electricity grids, computing capacity, cloud infrastructure, cooling systems and increasingly sophisticated models all form part of the equation.
- This supply chain constitutes the real strategic infrastructure of the twenty-first century. Throughout the twentieth century, control over trade routes, maritime chokepoints and telecommunications networks shaped the balance of power.
- Those assets remain essential today, but they are increasingly being complemented by another strategic capability: the ability to generate and distribute tokens on a global scale.
**China’s Full-Stack Strategy. **Viewed through this lens, China’s strategy takes on a different significance. Beijing is not merely supporting a handful of national champions; it is building an integrated ecosystem across the entire AI technology stack.
- Investment spans semiconductor manufacturing, computing infrastructure, open-weight models, cloud services and telecommunications networks, with Huawei emerging as one of the principal vehicles for exporting this technological architecture abroad.
- Exporting technology is paired with a broader strategic objective: establishing long-term economic and technological relationships, particularly across the Global South, by offering comprehensive packages that combine hardware, software, training and technical support.
**Washington’s Answer: Tokenpolitik. **This assessment leads the authors to argue that Washington should move beyond an approach centred primarily on export controls or isolated industrial initiatives. In their view, Tokenpolitik should evolve into a genuine foreign policy doctrine.
- The State Department, the Department of Commerce, the Treasury, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the Export-Import Bank (EXIM), allied governments and private companies should all operate within a single strategic framework aimed at providing trusted and affordable AI infrastructure to America’s strategic partners, while countering the expansion of China’s Digital Silk Road.
**The Link with Pax Silica. **Within this framework, the authors also point to Pax Silica, the U.S. initiative designed to build a secure, resilient and innovation-driven technology ecosystem alongside allied countries.
- The authors argue that Tokenpolitik should become its natural evolution, transforming a series of bilateral initiatives into a coherent long-term strategy.
- The reference carries particular significance for Italy, which officially joined the Pax Silica initiativeonly a few days ago, albeit later than several other partners.
**Redefining Great Power Competition. **The real novelty of Tokenpolitik lies in its attempt to redefine how international competition is understood.
- The rivalry between the United States and China is no longer limited to leadership in AI models or the production of advanced semiconductors. Increasingly, the core of the competition revolves around building the infrastructure that will enable the deployment of what is arguably the most transformative technology of the coming decades.
- This perspective extends well beyond the contest between the two superpowers.
- Decisions over who finances the next generation of data centres, who builds the energy networks that power them, which technological standards prevail and which countries emerge as providers of computing capacity will have lasting implications for economic competitiveness, technological sovereignty and access to digital services.
**A New Grammar of Power. **For this reason, Tokenpolitik is more than a theoretical concept developed by a think tank. It represents an attempt to describe an emerging phase in which international power depends less on owning a single breakthrough technology and increasingly on the ability to build, finance and govern the infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence.