Eleanor Danby 
For most of the past decade, the technology contest between the great powers has been told as a story of denial: export controls, chip bans and choke points held deliberately shut. A different argument is now moving to the front of the Western policy debate — that the more durable advantage comes not from locking rivals out but from building capacity and writing the rules everyone else has to follow. If that reading is right, the decisive ground is no longer only Washington or Beijing. It is Nairobi, Mexico City and the wider global South.
The other half of statecraft
The Atlantic Council's Economic Statecraft Initiative has been pushing a phrase built to correct an imbalance: positive economic statecraft. The term was recently picked up by The National Interest, in an essay on what it calls the other half of economic statecraft — the constructive side of investment, incentives and capacity-building that sits opposite sanctions and controls. Naming the neglected half is itself an argument: that the punitive tools have crowded out the productive ones.
Hypothesis: the centre of gravity in great-power economic strategy is shifting from restriction to construction — from locks to rules and capacity. Supporting this: the deliberate promotion of positive economic statecraft as a corrective, and a run of Western policy essays arguing that the United States should be setting standards rather than only guarding choke points. Against this: none of these sources says the locks are coming off. Export controls remain in force; what is described is a change of emphasis, an addition to the toolkit, not a dismantling of it. Confidence: modest — this is a shift in argument, not yet in policy.
Standards, not just silicon
The clearest statement of the new emphasis comes from energy. The Atlantic Council argues that a shift in US policy could better position Washington to set the standards for industrial AI across the energy sector — the point being that the contest is moving beyond the chip to the codes, benchmarks and safety rules that govern how the technology is deployed. Whoever writes those rules exports them; standards travel further and last longer than any single export ban.
The same logic runs through the debate over institutions. Rather than every country standing up its own isolated regulator, the Atlantic Council contends that strengthening regional capacity on AI trust and safety could ultimately prove more valuable than establishing isolated national institutions. Trust, in this framing, is infrastructure — and infrastructure built at regional scale is harder for any one power to capture.
Data becomes the contested resource
If standards are one front, data is the other. Data centres are becoming the new frontlines of global power, as an analysis by GIS Reports puts it — the physical estate where computation, and therefore leverage, is concentrated.
Kenya offers the sharpest test of what that means for a smaller economy. As data becomes a strategic resource, the country wants to monetise it and cash in on a resource it generates in volume. The Atlantic Council's caution is that without stronger safeguards on consent, privacy and valuation, the strategy could become a cautionary tale rather than a model. The risk is familiar from commodity history: sell a raw input cheaply, then buy back the finished product at a premium.
Inputs and the climb up the value chain
Mexico shows the third front — industrial inputs. Its record exports, the Atlantic Council notes, mask an uncomfortable reality: the country's fastest-growing export industry, data-processing machines, relies overwhelmingly on Asian inputs. A carefully redesigned USMCA, the argument goes, could help Mexico move up the value chain rather than remain an assembly point for parts made elsewhere. The trade pressure that looks like a threat could, on this reading, be turned into industrial policy.
| Front | Case in the sources | What is contested |
|---|---|---|
| Rules and standards | US position on industrial AI in energy | Who writes the codes, benchmarks and safety rules |
| Data | Kenya's data-monetisation drive | Consent, valuation and who captures the value |
| Industrial inputs | Mexico's data-processing exports | Dependence on Asian components; place in the value chain |
Why the fight lands in the global South
The thread connecting Nairobi, Mexico City and the energy-standards debate is that each is a decision about capacity — who builds it, on whose terms, and who writes the rules that govern it. That is precisely the terrain of positive economic statecraft, and it is contested most openly where institutions are still being built rather than defended.
For the global South the stakes cut both ways. Regional capacity on AI trust and safety and a redesigned trade deal are openings to move from raw supplier to rule-shaper. But the same conditions — thin safeguards, dependence on outside inputs, appetite for quick revenue — are exactly what turn a data strategy or an export boom into a cautionary tale. The difference between the two outcomes is institutions, and institutions are slow.
What to watch
- Whether positive economic statecraft moves from essay to budget line — concrete Western financing or standards programmes aimed at partners in the global South, not just rhetoric.
- Kenya's data framework: whether safeguards on consent, privacy and valuation are written in before monetisation scales, per the Atlantic Council's warning.
- The USMCA review: whether any redesign gives Mexico room to substitute domestic or North American inputs for Asian components in data-processing machines.
