China and Russia Are Targeting the Cables That Run the Global Economy — and the U.S. Is Behind on Defense

Undersea fiber-optic cables carry 99% of all intercontinental internet traffic, according to reporting from The Guardian and analysis by the Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute. Every bank transfer, military communication, cloud transaction, and international phone call runs through these lines. They support up to $10 trillion in daily financial transactions, according to Fox News Digital.

And they are wide open to attack.

What's actually been happening

This isn't hypothetical. According to Recorded Future, a U.S. cybersecurity firm, there were nine confirmed cable incidents in the Baltic Sea and off Taiwan's coast in 2024 and 2025 alone.

In November 2024, two submarine cables between Lithuania and Sweden were severed. Investigators blamed a Chinese vessel that dragged its anchor — deliberately. In December 2024, a Russian oil tanker was seized after it cut cables between Finland and Estonia. In February 2025, a Chinese-crewed freighter repeatedly zigzagged over cables between Taiwan and its Penghu Islands, severing them. The month before that, a Chinese-owned cargo ship was identified as the likely cause of damage to a Taiwan-U.S. cable.

Taiwan alone has reported roughly 30 subsea cable incidents in recent years, according to Fox News Digital. In some cases, Chinese vessels cut communications for months.

In August 2025, Finnish authorities charged the crew of the Russia-linked NewNew Polar Bear tanker for alleged Baltic cable sabotage — but the case was dropped for lack of proof, according to the Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute. The dropped case suggests how effectively this grey-zone strategy operates.

The strategic logic is simple and brutal

Russia and China don't need to fire a missile. They don't need to declare war. They cut a cable, an anchor "accidentally" drags, a freighter makes an odd navigational choice — and suddenly banking systems slow, military communications degrade, and financial markets hiccup.

As the Bloomsbury Institute analysis put it directly: cable sabotage lets states "send a message, disrupt, and intimidate without declaring open conflict."

The legal framework to stop it is essentially nonexistent. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is murky on who is responsible for protecting cables in international waters. Russia and China know this. Vagueness is the strategy.

The expert warning Washington needs to hear

Andrew Badger, chief strategy officer at Coalition Systems and a former Pentagon official, spoke frankly to Fox News Digital ahead of President Trump's planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

"America depends on the fragile nervous system of subsea cables for modern life," Badger said. "The asymmetric threat — China and Russia are devoting far more resources to attacking undersea infrastructure than the U.S. or its allies are to defending it. They've identified one of our greatest vulnerabilities, and we haven't caught up."

He went further: "A coordinated strike on American undersea infrastructure could fundamentally disrupt our way of life — the internet, banking, energy markets and military communications all run through these cables. The dollar cost is almost incalculable."

The real damage, Badger warned, would be the political chaos that follows — something closer to 2008 financial crisis energy, except the infrastructure causing it is sitting on the ocean floor and nobody can get to it fast.

What's being done — and why it's not enough

There are moves being made. Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire introduced the bipartisan Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 in April. Bipartisan agreement on a defense issue is increasingly rare.

The EU launched a Submarine Cable Security Action Plan. NATO's "Baltic Sentry" initiative is expanding undersea monitoring. The UK commissioned the RFA Proteus specifically to protect seabed infrastructure, according to the Bloomsbury Institute.

There are more than 500 active undersea cables spanning the world's oceans. Comprehensive protection is, by any honest assessment, currently impossible.

What mainstream coverage is getting wrong

Most mainstream outlets are treating this as a background diplomatic issue — something to mention in the context of Trump-Xi trade talks or NATO summits. That framing misses the point.

This is an infrastructure security crisis happening right now, with documented incidents, named vessels, and quantifiable economic exposure. The Red Sea cable damage in February 2024 — caused during the Yemen conflict — temporarily disrupted up to 25% of data traffic between Europe and Asia, per the Bloomsbury Institute. Twenty-five percent from a single incident.

CNN and MSNBC aren't leading with that. Fox News is covering it but mostly as a Trump-Xi backdrop story rather than the standalone security emergency it is.

What this means

The wires that move your money, power your internet, and connect U.S. military systems run along the ocean floor — almost entirely unguarded — and America's top adversaries have a documented, active campaign to cut them.

Every time a Chinese vessel "accidentally" drags an anchor over a cable, it's a test. A message. A proof of concept.

If Trump is going to Beijing to talk trade and AI with Xi, cable security belongs on the agenda. Because if China decides to stop talking and start cutting, $10 trillion a day is on the line — and the U.S. doesn't have a plan good enough to stop it.