The Vulnerability of Undersea Infrastructure in an Era of Rising Tensions

Attacks on strategic undersea telecom cables off the coast of Taiwan are not new, but when one was suspected of being severed off its northern coast by a Chinese-owned ship in early January, it fit a growing pattern. Just a few weeks earlier, a Russian-flagged ship had cut an electricity cable running between Finland and Estonia in the Baltic Sea.

That followed several similar developments in the Baltic involving Chinese-flagged ships harming undersea infrastructure, including severing fiber-optic cables in November and damaging a gas pipeline…