A Russian shadow-fleet oil ship dragged its outlet a hundred yards across the Baltic seabed the day before Christmas, causing damage to world cords and the Estonian Estlink-2 power line.
The Chinese large aircraft Yi Peng 3 nearly the same thing the fortnight before, rupturing Baltic Sea online cables.
The Trans-PacificExpress Cable, which connects South Korea, Japan, and the United States, was damaged by a Cameroon-registered Chinese vessel ( Shunxing-39 ), which broke up in January 2025.  ,
Injuries at sea do occur. For years, ocean communications cables have been hacked by sharks, porpoises, and ostensibly thoughtless sailors. Yet in recent years, basically “accidental” undersea cable disruptions have suddenly increased, not only around Taiwan, but also in the Baltic, the Red Sea, and abroad while well.
What is causing this string of oceanic conflicts, and what does it mean for foreign affairs in general?
According to most experts, the Information Revolution is the greatest force behind cord wars. The internet is extremely in charge of almost every aspect of our lives as that terrible juggernaut progresses. And 95 percent of web traffic travels beneath the sea, largely outside of nation-state boundaries, which contributes to a rash of wire construction and the above-mentioned geopolitical tensions.
For a variety of reasons, web traffic travels beneath the sea. The most important aspect is that maritime transmission is dramatically less expensive and more effective than the main alternative, since satellite hardware costs more to produce than fiber-optic cable.
Cable transportation is also subject to a small amount of regulation across international waters, which gives operators more flexibility to adapt to changing demand patterns as technology develops. So, Seaborne traffic is best suited to the rapidly expanding multinational service trade.
Around 400 significant undersea wires, stretching for a million miles in total, mostly across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from the United States to Europe and Northeast Asia, lie mainly in global waters, making up the vast majority of the internet connections that travel across the globe at the speed of light.
With less powerful connectors connecting Latin America, Africa, and other parts of the world, lower capacity extensions connect Europe and Asia via the Indian Ocean. Nearly all of this complex network is located beneath the sea, with some of the most rapidly expanding portions being constructed in areas of severe US-China geopolitical conflict.
Thus, undersea cable traffic is both extremely important economically and economically for advanced societies, and also highly susceptible to disruption. The top international players, particularly the United States and China, are becoming more and more competitive as a result of their economic ( and geopolitical ) importance. And there are spoilers out there intent on asymmetrically challenging the main players, particularly Russia and a plethora of international terrorists.
For five fundamental reasons,” cable wars” have significantly accelerated over the past ten years as geopolitics has entered the picture. China’s rapidly expanding cable network, which is focused on developing countries stretching westward across the Indian Ocean to Europe and Africa, has been its main driver.
Development projects in China have received significant funding and have focused on establishing direct links between developing countries and underdeveloped information societies with strategic interests in China.
A similarly geostrategic American response to Chinese expansion across the Indo-Pacific has been a second driver of cable wars, using both legal and physical tools. The US’s objection to a trans-Pacific cable in the US to Hong Kong, which American regulators rejected in 2024, was the first one.
An alternate trans-Pacific cable connecting the US to Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Singapore via Palau was created in collaboration with Japan.
In competition with China’s Peace cable from Gwadar in Pakistan through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean to Marseilles, the US also initiated the Sea-We-6 Indian Ocean cable from Singapore westward.
Thus, the US re-entered the cable-laying game, which was inspired by geopolitical competition, as it used diplomatic means to stop the construction of Chinese cables. The US and China engaged in fierce combat in these and related projects to establish a binding relationship between East Asia and Arica in self-contained configurations.
Geopolitical conflict in crucial areas of the world has contributed to the deepening Eurasian cable wars, which has had three additional drivers.
The Ukraine war, which was sparked by Russia’s February 2022 attack on Ukraine, was of course the most dramatic. The Russians have reportedly found asymmetric undersea warfare, which involves frequent covert, deniable attacks on undersea cables, to be a low-cost yet high-impact form of response as the conflict has steadily grown and with Russian bombardment intensifying even as the West has provided more advanced weaponry to the Ukrainians.
The Russians have had special geopolitical incentives to target Baltic infrastructure as a result of the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO in 2023 and the fragile yet deteriorating Nordic infrastructure ties to the former Soviet Baltic republics.
The Middle East’s growing regional conflict has also been sparked by the Hamas attack in October 2023 and followed by Israel’s unwavering support of the Iranian” Axis of Resistance” ( Axis of Resistance ).
With over 10 % of global internet traffic passing through Egypt, the Red Sea has been a particularly vulnerable arena and proximate target. The Shiite Houthis of Yemen, who rule the Bab al-Mandab’s Arabian coast, have threatened undersea cable lines, particularly those that are connected to the US and Europe, as well as maritime commerce from the Indian Ocean to Europe.
The Taiwan Strait is the third Eurasian flashpoint, where cable disputes have already broken out and seem to be getting worse. Hybrid warfare serves a short-term Chinese geopolitical goal, similar to what happened with the Russians in the Baltic: to put pressure on the Taiwanese regime without provoking a kinetic response from the United States.
Two subsea internet cables that connect Matsu and Taiwan were damaged by Chinese ships in 2023, causing Matsu to experience internet blackouts. A similar incident occurred in January 2025, just the latest in a series of roughly thirty gray-zone undersea-cable incidents against Taiwan since 2017.
As I mentioned in my recently published book, Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics, the sea lanes of the Indo-Pacific and those of the Arctic seem likely candidates for a further escalation of cable wars.
The main conflict point is between the cable war leaders, the United States and China, and there are numerous flashpoints that could stoke a rift.
The sea lanes between Suez and Shanghai offer a number of flashpoints that are particularly attractive to disruptors because they involve less-developed infrastructure than those in the G-7, and because they cause high geopolitical tensions and littoral regions are less equipped to deal with disruptions.
In addition to Taiwan, chokepoints like the Strait of Malacca, where piracy has always been a problem, and Diego Garcia’s area offer the possibility of cable conflict over a cable building, surveillance, and cable interdiction.
The status of potential landing sites and information centers in nations like Sri Lanka will likely be a source of contention, especially since a lack of bases nearby makes it difficult for the US to respond to cable disruption.
The Arctic is turning into a region of deepening information infrastructure construction that could lead to cable conflict as well, and even natural factors like global warming are likely to accelerate the ongoing cable war.
Fortunately, the White House and the US Congress are beginning to understand the risks associated with cable conflict given the rising likelihood of it affecting national security. The Undersea Cable Security and Protection Act ( H. R. 9766 ), which was proposed in September 2024, is a significant first step.
America needs to collaborate with NATO and other allies to combat Chinese, Iranian, and Russian overt and gray-zone efforts in addition to improving the protection of undersea telecommunications cables and associated landing points in the United States.
Kent Calder is the director of Johns Hopkins University’s Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies, a former US Ambassador to Japan, and the author of Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics ( Brookings, 2025 ).