By Marcus Havelock
In the middle of the North Sea, ships drop anchor not for trade, but to lower a different kind of lifeline: fiber-optic cables as thin as a garden hose, carrying nearly all the world’s internet traffic. These strands of glass, buried in the seabed, are the hidden arteries of the global economy. And like railroads in the 19th century or oil chokepoints in the 20th, they are becoming the contested frontiers of great-power rivalry. What divides nations today is not just ideology or territory, but the control of invisible threads binding the modern world together.
From Telegraph Lines to Firewalls
This is not the first time infrastructure has drawn the map of conflict. The British Empire once jealously guarded undersea telegraph lines, convinced that a cut cable could cripple its reach from India to the Caribbean. In the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was as much about radar stations, listening posts, and telephone exchanges as it was about tanks and walls. Today, the digital curtain takes shape beneath the oceans and in the server farms that terminate those lines. Where telegraph poles once dotted borders, now firewalls and data sovereignty laws rise in their place.
The New Strategic Chokepoints
Consider the Arctic. As melting ice opens new sea lanes, Russian and Chinese state-backed firms are laying cables along the Northern Sea Route, positioning themselves to dominate Eurasian data flows. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies funnel billions into projects designed to bypass adversarial territories—rerouting traffic through trusted partners in the Indo-Pacific. Each splice and landing station becomes a node of strategic control. Like the Suez or Malacca straits, these are chokepoints—but of information, not ships.
Vulnerability by Design
What makes these cables powerful also makes them fragile. They are unarmored, lying in international waters, and can be damaged by something as simple as an errant fishing trawl. In 2022, the severing of just two cables off the Shetland Islands plunged parts of Scotland into digital darkness. During wartime, such vulnerabilities are military temptations. NATO naval exercises now routinely practice the defense of undersea infrastructure. China and Russia conduct mirror drills. It is a reminder that wars of the future may not start with bombs in cities, but with silent cuts in the deep.
The Curtain Hardens
As nations seek to protect their digital arteries, the curtain between spheres of influence grows thicker. Countries are being forced to choose: whose cables land on their shores, whose data centers host their traffic, whose standards shape their privacy laws. For small states, neutrality is narrowing. The new Iron Curtain is not a physical wall, but a lattice of glass, encryption, and exclusive contracts.
Fiber-optic cables promise connection but deliver division. Just as the Berlin Wall symbolized the fracture of the 20th century, these strands of glass may come to define the 21st. The lines we cannot see are becoming the boundaries we cannot cross.
