Category: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

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.

Geopolitics Russia The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Ukraine War

War in Ukraine

By Dan Schiller

In upcoming posts, we shall have things to say about informational aspects of the current world disorder. Likely the most urgent of these pertain to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Why do US leaders deem it worthwhile to undertake the nuclear gamble they are making in Ukraine?  One reason has been publicly asserted: as US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated in April , 2022, the US is trying to weaken and destabilize Russia.[1] This goal has been more difficult to accomplish than the US projected; moreover, even partly realized, it has rendered Russia more dependent on America’s adversary, China – Russia’s largest trading partner.[2] Russia brings to its Chinese ally substantial assets: military technology; newly opened Arctic sea lanes for inter-Asian shipping; river passages from northern Russia to the Black Sea[3]; abundant endowments of oil, gas, water, and prospectively arable land; and a land corridor from the Baltic to the Pacific sporting a 2600 mile border with China itself.  In sum, it’s not clear that weakening Russia constitutes a rational objective for any but the obsessive neocons who dominate Washington’s foreign policy.  These cadres, Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and the like, are intent on completing the project of extending The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Russia’s doorstep – a project that Paul Wolfowitz and other forbears initiated during the 1990s.

A second reason for US support for the Ukraine war has, however, gone mostly unmentioned. US policy is motivated by an overarching concern to resubordinate Europe, by “cutting Russia off totally from Germany and the EU, cementing permanent U.S. control of Western Europe.”[4] So far the US has been very effective in actualizing this objective – although it also seems likely to strengthen the far right in European politics as living standards deteriorate.[5] German reliance on Russian energy has been reduced by the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline and related decisions by the German government, removing much of Germany’s ability to waffle on its commitment to the war[6]; and NATO is being enlarged again, to include Finland and – almost certainly – Sweden – even if Europe’s military expenditures have not yet reached the level desired by US leaders. The European Left has meanwhile been fractured, so that a coherent mass peace movement has not arisen to challenge the war.   

The Ukrainian political economy is shot through with graft and corruption. Arms shipments are not exempt from these disabling practices; nor are they necessarily providing equipment most likely to be effective in repelling the Russians.[7] Within this wider matrix, however, the Ukrainians’ fighting strength has been augmented by their reliance on US communications and information technology. 

US targeting information was used by Ukraine less than four months after the start of Russia’s invasion to sink the Russian Navy’s Black Sea missile cruiser, the Moskva.[8] Satellite imagery, NATO aircraft overflight intelligence, and intercepts of Russian military communications were by then flowing to Ukraine’s military in “real time,” according to a Ukrainian official, becoming a “key enabler of the Ukrainian campaign.”[9]

US corporate enterprise also stepped forward to assist. Elon Musk’s privately owned SpaceX satellites have provided broadband communications for a variety of purposes to Ukraine’s military.  In February 2023, SpaceX’s president announced that the company had taken unnamed measures to prevent Ukraine from using its Starlink service to operate offensive drones in the region.[10]  How reliable this announcement was, and whether it came after the fact, are not known. 

The Ukrainians’ reliance on Lockheed-Martin’s HIMARS computer-guided rocket artillery also binds them to a larger information network that is under US control.[11]

In these three instances, US organizations are undeniably parties to the Ukraine war.  Yet it seems unthinkable that the mainstream media, let alone the US Congress – which alone possesses the power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution – should demand to hold a formal debate over US participation in this grave and escalating conflict.

[1] Natasha Bertrand, Kylie Atwood, Keven Liptak and Alex Marquardt, “Austin’s assertion that US wants to ‘weaken’ Russia underlines Biden strategy shift,” CNN, April 26, 2022.

[2] Perhaps this is a reason why, by early in 2023, there began to be at least some quasi-official discussion of how to limit the length of the war.  Samuel Charap, Miranda Priebe, “Avoiding a Long War: U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict,” RAND National Security Research Division, PE-A2510-1, 2023. 

[3] Alastair Crooke, “The Most Egregious Mistake,” Strategic Culture Foundation January 23, 2023.

[4] Diana Johnstone, “Demonstrate Together,” Consortium News, February 14, 2023.

[5] Wolfgang Streeck, “Getting Closer,” Sidecar, November 7, 2022.

[6] Alexander Zevin and Seymour Hersh, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Sidecar, February 15, 2023 ; Seymour Hersh, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline,” Substack, February 8, 2023.

[7] Andrew Cockburn, “More Magic Weapons for Ukraine!,” Spolis of War, January 25, 2023.

[8] Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. Intelligence Helped Ukraine Strike Russian Flagship, Officials Say,” New York Time, May 5, 2022.

[9] Shane Harris, Paul Sonne, Dan Lamothe and Michael Birnbaum, “U.S. provided intelligence that helped Ukraine sink Russian warship,” Washington Post, May 5, 2022.

[10] Joey Roulette, “SpaceX curbed Ukraine’s use of Starlink internet for drones – company president,” Reuters February 9, 2023.

[11] Christopher Caldwell, “Russia and Ukraine Have Incentives to Negotiate.  The U.S. Has Other Plans,” New York Times, February 7, 2023; HIMARS: Protecting our soldiers with combat proven reliability, Lockheed Martin.