America’s adversaries are finding new ways to break the internet. This weekend, Sweden detained a ship for allegedly destroying an underseas cable shortly after leaving Russia. Around Thanksgiving, a Chinese ship dragged its anchor across a hundred miles of the Baltic Sea, severing other seabed internet connections. And earlier this month, the Taiwanese Coast Guard ran down another Chinese-owned ship that sailed over one of the few cables connecting Taiwan to the rest of the world just before it snapped.
Chinese apps like TikTok and DeepSeek dominate headlines, but the battle for control of the internet is not only taking place in cyberspace. Russia and China are breaking parts of the global internet, and they are revealing parts of their strategy for toppling the United States.
Dominating the internet is a priority for China. In 2015, it launched the Digital Silk Road to make China a world leader in internet technology. Building undersea cables is an important part: When countries connect to the rest of the world through China, Beijing can spy on them more easily, steer them toward other Chinese-dominated technologies, and even police their internet activity. Chinese telecom giant Huawei built out 15 percent of the global internet before the Trump administration sanctioned it in 2019, and Chinese companies will install nearly half of the underwater internet cables planned for 2023-2028.
American sanctions are much more effective than Chinese ones, so China uses other methods to damage the West’s internet. Beijing blocks internet projects that run through the South China Sea despite The Hague dismissing its territorial claims there in 2016. And it is ramping up its sabotage campaign.
Attacking NATO’s internet infrastructure is part of China’s overall strategy to weaken the United States. Beijing despises NATO and accuses it and the United States of adopting a “Cold War mentality.” When Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin announced their “no limits” partnership shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine, they agreed to “oppose further enlargement of NATO” as well as “the formation of closed bloc structures and opposing camps in the Asia-Pacific region.” After NATO observed that China was enabling Russia’s war effort, a Foreign Ministry spokesman told the alliance to “avoid messing up Asia the way it messed up Europe.” Chinese and Russian ships are now destroying internet and energy infrastructure for Finland and Sweden, both of which joined NATO after Russia’s belligerence made their former neutrality untenable.
At first glance, this is a strange maneuver. Most countries do not go out of their way to make enemies, as China is doing in Europe. NATO’s security commitments stop far from China’s borders too. Beijing nonetheless sees NATO as a threat because it views all American alliances that way. A diplomatically isolated United States seems weaker to Beijing, so it is trying to break up America’s alliances all around the globe. In this case, America’s adversaries are trying to show that Sweden’s and Finland’s decision to join NATO was foolish.
Beijing is using a similar strategy closer to home. It is trying to convince Taiwan that resistance is futile and that accepting integration with the mainland is the smarter move. Cutting off the island’s internet connections, bombarding it with propaganda, and effectively blockading it with military drills and missile tests are all designed to make the island democracy surrender without needing an invasion.
Losing Taiwan would be catastrophic for Americans. Most people are by now familiar with the significance of Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing, which both Joe Biden and Donald Trump want to bring to the United States. But that industry is not nearly the most important reason for defending Taiwan. If China takes the island, it will have a base that dominates the shipping lanes Japan and South Korea rely on for food and fuel. How well could either country stand up to Beijing then? And if they buckle under, there is little chance for the United States to keep together a coalition that can prevent China from dominating Asia.
The underwater cables that make the global internet work exemplify the larger strategic problem. When the internet spread around the world after the Cold War, the U.S. military dominated the “global commons,” the air and waterways that most international trade traverses. There was little need then to think about securing these cables from sabotage or destruction. Those days are gone.
So far, the damage from China’s cable-cutting campaign has been minimal. Traffic has been redirected with relatively little fuss. But each cable becomes more important as fewer and fewer remain. And China’s threats will grow more persuasive the longer its aggression goes unpunished.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
