From the Petrodollar to the Tokendollar: Economic Statecraft in the AI Era

Money defines power and, through it, international order. When the dollar came off the gold standard in the early 1970s, the United States built a new financial architecture that addressed commodity price inflation, energy flows, and global trade. Oil was traded largely in dollars. Saudi surpluses were recycled through U.S. banks and Treasury markets. U.S. firms sold goods, services, and technology to the Gulf. Security ties reinforced financial ties. A 1979 U.S. Government Accountability Office report described the U.S.-Saudi Joint Commission as a mechanism to strengthen political ties, support Saudi industrialization, recycle petrodollars, and expand flows of U.S. technology. The resulting petrodollar locked in U.S. dollar dominance and through it a larger security architecture.

Now the United States should lead a coalition of free nations to build the global technology stack and make the dollar the default unit of pricing for token generation, the default commodity of the AI era. This pricing should be connected to U.S. futures markets and pegged cryptocurrencies to maximize liquidity. Furthermore, the stack should showcase U.S. technology designed to accelerate development in the Global South, including small modular reactors (SMRs) and next-generation infrastructure that supports building more data centers overseas to relieve domestic pressure in the United States. This combination of economic statecraft and infrastructure development represents an entirely new approach to diplomacy and development.

Tokenpolitik: Aligning AI Stack Construction with U.S. Diplomacy

The world is entering a new era of great power competition defined by tokenpolitik and by which side has the deepest AI stack. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang describes the AI stack as a “five-layer cake”: energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications, with every application pulling on each layer beneath it down to the power plant. This stack is what powers “AI factories” that turn energy into tokens, making algorithmic intelligence a measurable industrial output.

Tokens are the basic units of data an AI model processes and generates. They represent characters, numbers, pixels, and even small slices of audio files that have been decomposed to match against patterns and draw inferences to predict the best reply to a prompt. As a result, tokens determine context limits and cost estimates for AI projects. The more the economy comes to rely on AI applications, the more token usage and pricing will become a central driver of growth and productivity.

In strategic terms, the side that can produce more trusted tokens per watt and per dollar will have the advantage in great power competition. That makes AI diplomacy increasingly aligned with infrastructure development. To date, the United States has had an advantage here based on deep private sector capital investments and leading frontier developers, but China is closing the gap. Its lead in energy and infrastructure investments in the Global South through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative and Digital Silk Road represents a new foreign policy challenge.

The race to bring AI to the Global South will be one of the decisive diplomacy and development challenges of the next generation because many states still lack the power systems, data centers, cloud infrastructure, and financing needed to benefit from AI at scale. The International Energy Agency projects that global data center electricity consumption could more than double by 2030, with AI as a central driver. Countries that cannot secure affordable and reliable power will rent intelligence from someone else. Countries that build AI factories on Chinese finance, equipment, and technology standards will enter a different technology order.

This reality creates a new need to build AI factory corridors with allies and strategic partners globally, including in the Global South. Here, China has sought to outflank the United States, Europe, and other free economies for over a generation. These corridors need to account for the whole AI stack, and especially power. The U.S. government should help private sector companies by prioritizing key corridor projects and aligning different government authorities to support advanced SMRs, grid upgrades, secure fiber optic networks, workforce training, and other infrastructure upgrades required to create hyperscale clusters.

Policy is already moving in this direction, though still in pieces. The White House executive order on promoting the export of the American AI technology stack calls for a coordinated national effort to export full-stack U.S. AI packages. The Department of Commerce’s American AI Exports Program asks industry-led consortia to deliver integrated offerings that include AI-optimized hardware, data pipelines, models, cybersecurity, and applications.

Promoting the export of the AI stack is an interagency effort. The State Department can align allies and partner governments, including existing efforts linked to Pax Silica, to identify key corridors. Agencies such as the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) can invest in supporting infrastructure and incentivize private sector firms in the United States to build the AI stack globally. At the same time, the Department of Energy can lead SMR and grid diplomacy while the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Commerce, and even the Department of Homeland Security, through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), can play a role. The AI stack will therefore form a network of infrastructure that creates power and influence, and through it, a new international order.

The Tokendollar

To secure its central position in a new international order, the United States should advocate for tokens to clear in dollars. Similar to the petrodollar, the tokendollar would support demand for U.S. dollars, lower borrowing costs, and larger deficits over the next generation, economic benefits whose importance is only increasing owing to the size of government debt and increased borrowing costs.

Furthermore, tokendollar contracts traded on futures markets would also let firms hedge future AI costs. AI infrastructure bonds could finance data centers against contracted token capacity. Insurance markets could price outage risk, cyber risk, and performance risk. Universities and national labs could receive token-dollar research credits. The U.S. government could even champion a new form of security cooperation, supporting allies with surge access to AI inference through tokendollar contract vehicles.

This new financial order could be linked to stablecoins. The United States should use a dollar-backed stablecoin to settle tokendollar contracts. The GENIUS Act created a federal stablecoin framework and requires 100 percent reserve backing with liquid assets such as dollars or short-term Treasuries, thus providing a framework for linking digital financing to tokendollar contracts.

The Next Chapter of Economic Statecraft

The tokendollar can become the key architecture for a new era of AI diplomacy and development that links finance, infrastructure, technology standards, and deeper public–private sector coordination. It will require concerted effort over the next two years to come to fruition.

The Trump administration should create a National AI Stack and Tokendollar Initiative chaired by the National Security Council and National Economic Council. The effort should be led by the Department of State but pull in representatives from multiple agencies and even private sector firms to identify priority corridors, align financing, establish standards, and anticipate likely Chinese countermoves. The team will also need technical experts from the Department of the Treasury, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Commerce (i.e., the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and industry to create trusted token-generation metrics. These metrics should price verified AI work rather than raw output.

The Department of State, through EXIM and the DFC, will need to develop full-stack packages that support U.S. firms currently building AI stacks globally. These efforts would expand on existing initiatives such as EXIM’s ExportAI Initiative and integrate key Department of Energy efforts linked to SMRs and modernizing grid infrastructure globally.

Most importantly, the president and key members of his cabinet will need to conduct behind-the-scenes negotiations with key firms and states to set conditions for the announcement of the tokendollar as a new settlement contract. Like the emergence of the petrodollar, the most important deliberations will be secret and involve intermediaries from the private sector working alongside diplomats and senior officials.

Just as the petrodollar linked U.S. financial power to the energy system of the twentieth century, the tokendollar should serve as the architecture for a new AI era. The U.S. government should support U.S. firms building the AI stack by aligning key government support and creating a financial framework for setting token contracts in dollars and linked stablecoins.

Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.