Truman National Security Project members, writing in their personal capacity.

In the summer of 1993, scarcely two years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, a quiet confrontation unfolded on a remote patch of Latvian farmland. Just outside the small town of Skrunda stood one of the most important early-warning radar complexes in the former USSR, a massive Daryal installation capable of tracking missile launches across Europe. Though Latvia had regained its independence, Moscow insisted that Skrunda remained essential to Russian security and refused to vacate the site.

The submersible Mir-1 descended through the Arctic twilight on August 2, 2007, its floodlights cutting narrow corridors through water dense with drifting ice. Nearly three miles below the surface, the vehicle settled onto the seabed at the geographic North Pole, a place no human craft had ever reached. Then, in a gesture crafted for maximum geopolitical theater, the Russian expedition planted a titanium tricolor flag into the silty floor of the Arctic Ocean.

Few domains are as overlooked yet as indispensable to modern power projection as the ocean floor. Nearly all of the world’s internet traffic, more than 95 percent, transits through roughly 570 subsea fiber-optic cables. These systems underpin not only the global economy but also the operational command and control of modern militaries. Despite their centrality, they remain vulnerable, exposed, and increasingly subject to foreign interference.

On a cold February morning in 2025, residents of Taiwan’s Penghu Islands awoke to an unsettling silence. The whir of routers and the flow of digital communications, so ordinary as to be unnoticed, had vanished. ATMs blinked uselessly, online banking froze, and even the Taiwanese Coast Guard’s secure lines faltered.
In February 2023, CIA Director William Burns revealed that, according to U.S. intelligence, Xi Jinping had ordered the Chinese military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Since then, China’s coercion has shifted from sporadic brinkmanship to a steady campaign of naval maneuvers and near-daily air incursions into Taiwan’s air defense zone.