Author: Dan Schiller

Geopolitics Submarine Cables The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Baltic Blow-Up

By Dan Schiller

Attempts to project dominance over the Baltic Sea have recurred for hundreds of years, as rival states have vied with one another over economic and military supremacy. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, the Baltic has again become a conflict zone. After the collapse of German Democratic Republic in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the next year; and the accession of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to NATO during the 1990s and early 2000s, followed by the accession of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, the Baltic has been – nearly – encircled by NATO.   But for Russia. 

A tiny Russian exclave, Kaliningrad, fronts onto the Baltic, while Russia itself enjoys direct access via three additional ports located on the Gulf of Finland: Primorsk, Ust-Luga and St. Petersburg. Even as the US has sanctioned Russia’s fuel exports, supplies of Russian oil and liquified natural gas are being shipped across the Baltic to varied destinations.[1]

This contributes to making this sea one of the world’s busiest waterways, with 70,000 vessels sailing annually through the Oresund – the strait at the western end of the Baltic between Denmark and Sweden, through which ships then pass into the North Sea and ultimately into the Atlantic Ocean.[2] The combination of NATO oversight, heightened US policing of submarine cables across the world,[3] and Russian fuel shipments is turning the shallow Baltic into a fraught zone.

Indeed, the drama over undersea cables has recently become intense. Somewhere in the world, two to four undersea cables break every week, on average – usually because of ships’ anchors, fishing gear, or natural disasters.[4] Reports have circulated during recent months, however, purporting to trace at least four cable breaks in the Baltic back to sabotage. Given the world’s dependence on undersea cables to carry everything from social media messages to enormous financial transfers, these outages have been heavily publicized.

In each case, NATO countries have blamed Russia or China.  Finland and Germany have separately detained and boarded ships they suspect of deliberately damaging data and power cables with their anchors; a Norwegian military university researcher has pronounced that the cable infrastructure “presents an attractive target” and that there are credible accounts of sabotage around the world[5]; Germany’s defense minister leveled a charge of “hybrid” warfare against Russia.[6] NATO itself quickly assembled military assets to protect the seabed infrastructure under a new program called Baltic Sentry.[7]

However, did these incidents actually testify to a threat mounted by adversaries – or were they more routine cable-breaks? US intelligence officials asserted late in November 2024 that the two cable cuts reported by then were not deliberate acts, though European authorities had not discounted sabotage.[8] Despite the additional two ruptures since then, uncertainty remains.  The Washington Post reported on January 19, 2025 that several senior US and European intelligence officials believed that the cables had been severed by accident. Investigations by the US and a half-dozen European security services had turned up “no indication” that commercial ships suspected of dragging their anchors across seabed cables had done so intentionally – let alone at Moscow’s behest.  “Instead,” the Post related, “U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date – including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence – points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels.”[9] In other words, business as usual.

Despite this, NATO has mobilized to create a new power complex to monitor and repel perceived threats to the Baltic Sea’s cable infrastructure. And so the US struggle to control global communications expands, now into northern latitudes. 

[1] Vaibhav Raghunandan and Petras Katinas, “December 2024-Monthly Analysis of Russian Fossil Fuel Exports and Sanctions,” Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, January 10, 202; Malte Humpert, “Russia’s Gazprom Sends Baltic LNG Through Arctic Avoiding Africa Detour,” gCaptain, September 10, 2024.

[2] Michael North, The Baltic: A History (Cambridge: Harvard, 2015), 320-21; Elisabeth Braw, “Russia’s Shadow Fleet Is Putting Danish Waters in Danger,” Foreign Policy, March 26, 2024,

[3] Winston Qiu, “US and its Allies Issue Joint Statement on the Security and Resilience of Undersea Cables,” Submarine Cable Networks, October 7, 2024.

[4] Lane Burdette, “What To Know About Submarine Cable Breaks,” Telegeography,  November 21, 2024.

[5] James Glanz, Elian Peltier and Pablo Robles, “Undersea Surgeons,” New York Times, November 29, 2024; Baltic Sea could be deliberate act: Norwegian premier,” Anadolu Agency 30 December 2024; Melissa Eddy and Johanna Lemola, ”Severing of Baltic Sea Cables Was ‘Sabotage,’ Germany Says,” New York Times, November 19, 2024.

[7] Julian Borger, “NATO flotilla assembles off Estonia to protect undersea cables in Baltic Sea,” The Guardian, January 19, 2025.

[8] James Glanz, Elian Peltier and Pablo Robles, “Undersea Surgeons,” New York Times,  November 29, 2024; also, see Max Colchester and Bojan Pancevski, “The Deep-Sea Battle Over the World’s Data Cables Is Heating Up,” Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2025; Richard Milne, “Baltic Sea data cable damaged in latest case of potential sabotage,” Financial Times, January 26, 2025.

[9] Greg Miller, Robyn Dixon and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Accidents, not Russian Sabotage, behind undersea cable damage, officials say,” Washington Post,  January 19, 2025.

Digital Trade Free Flow of Information

Contingency at the USTR?

By Dan Schiller

The free flow of information was, as IO has discussed, the guiding doctrine of US international communications policy from the 1940s – the era of news agencies and movies – to the late 2010s and internet-enabled transnational data flows.[1] 

In the face of growing restrictions placed on cross-border data flows by numerous other countries, however, the Biden Administration thereafter reduced the purchase of this foundational policy. Free flow continued to guide the US agenda, but for digital trade blocs:  alliances between the US and specific groups of other countries. The US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and the US-Japan trade pact were leading examples; and the US sought to expand on these, notably through negotiations on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF).

While still underlining its ostensible commitment to free cross-border flows in general, in February 2024, the Administration nevertheless moved to hedge this through an Executive Order portending restrictions on access to Americans’ “bulk-sensitive data” by “countries of concern.”[2] If the policy context had come to seem ambiguous in early 2024, however, then this was mostly because, paradoxically, in late October 2023 it had grown startlingly clear. This was when the United States Trade Representative (USTR) suddenly withdrew US support for free cross-border data flow provisions in both the ongoing IPEF and World Trade Organization negotiations – upending the prior US position.[3]

How could this happen? The US had been compelled to attenuate its longstanding free flow policy by virtue of its reduced global power or, put differently, because other countries had succeeded in mandating local storage of data and/or in imposing restrictions on international data flows. In response, the US had “shrunk” its policy to apply to digital trade blocs of allied countries – still collectively accounting for a large share of the global economy.  With the late October action, however, the Trade Representative sabotaged the very policy that the US had hitherto done its utmost to preserve, albeit with a reduced footprint. Why?

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Geopolitics US-China Relations

Hatchet Job

By Dan Schiller

After China’s leaders opened their country to foreign investment in the early 1990s, US transnational companies flooded in searching for cheap labor and new markets.  Foreign direct investment [FDI] in Chinese plants and factories, as well as portfolio investment in Chinese corporate shares, skyrocketed.[1]  Established in tax-haven jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands, shell companies – “special purpose entities” – smoothed the way for foreign venture capital, hedge funds, and other speculative interests to take advantage of the boom.

For thirty years, US manufacturing and finance capital profited mightily from these arrangements.[2]  By setting conditions on foreign investment and through other measures, meanwhile, China’s strong state strengthened and expanded its own economy. At the same time, continuing a trend which began during the late 1970s and 1980s, US working-class communities experienced prolonged devastation as high-wage jobs were relocated, exported, or simply eliminated. Anger and deepening political disaffection were the results. 

Drawing opportunistically on this anger, the unexpected presidency of Donald Trump produced a sea-change in US-China relations. Though there’s plenty of informal everyday racism in the United States, to bring it to bear on political-economic objectives requires organizational work. To rationalize his “America First” economic policy toward China, Trump turned to anti-Chinese racism, for example by referring to Covid as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus.”[3]

The Biden administration heightened the stand-off by supplementing Trump’s tariffs with export controls on state-of-the-art semiconductor technologies, AI, and quantum computing – citing both economic and national security.[4]  Democrats and Republicans now combined a stepped-up racism with attacks on purported Chinese “subversion.” Laws restricting Chinese nationals from buying property were enacted by fifteen US states, with other such laws pending in twenty others.  Academic scientists at US universities of Chinese descent experienced racial profiling and harassment, and many did not feel safe in their jobs; Chinese graduate students were barred from academic laboratories in Florida.[5] Violence inflicted upon Asian Americans rose during the Covid 19 pandemic, and persisted at a high level.[6]

China’s Xi Jinping reciprocated by according new emphasis to nationalistic rhetoric and with defiant economic policies toward the U.S.[7] A dominant political faction in the US then took US aggression up a notch. 

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Free Flow of Information Geopolitics New World Information and Communication Order

Freedom of Information and the Rise and Decline of American Power (Part IV)

By Dan Schiller

In the world’s number-two economy, China, the party-state retained control over its national internet from the outset (the 1990s).  During recent years, China’s Data Security Law, alongside its Personal Information Protection Law and its high-level regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, have constructed an evolving framework for close supervision of China’s internet – and for data flows out of and into China.  Other nations, notably in southeast and west Asia, are adopting elements of the Chinese model of internet governance.[1]  Additional countries, including Russia, have strengthened state controls over their national internets.  Meanwhile, citing a variety of factors, at least sixty states have staged internet shutdowns.[2]  Thus, obstacles to unrestricted commercial data flows from and to the US have proliferated. 

In addition, alongside a growing number of other states China and Russia also have been trying to win governmental authority to regulate the global internet – as previous telecommunications networks have been regulated – through multilateral organizations, especially the International Telecommunication Union.  Thus far, they have not succeeded: the US model of “multi-stakeholderism,” which signifies loose control by big corporate capital and the US government – retains its hold.  But the US approach of multi-stakeholderism has been placed on the defensive.  The world economic crisis of 2008 and the historic process of geopolitical-economic redivision that followed it are strengthening divergent nation-state interests.

Evident as well are structural changes, of varied kinds.  During the 1990s – the second highpoint of US global power – the infrastructure of the cross-border internet was based largely in the United States, and most international internet data was transported through the US no matter its origin or destination. However, by the late 2010s the morphology of this worldwide distribution system no longer looked as it had a quarter-century before. The internet’s infrastructure had been expanded and reconfigured.  The network of subsea cables and internet exchanges was extended and thickened. US social media companies had set up data centers outside the United States, to attain faster and cheaper access to foreign markets.  Some powerful new internet companies became established in China. National regulations had mandated that data collected within a country be stored within that country’s jurisdiction; by 2023, 75% of all nations had implemented some kind of data localization rules.[3] Economic policies and antitrust protections, privacy strictures, and national security measures crisscrossed and combined in complex ways to engender these assertions of jurisdictional sovereignty.

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