Still Waters Run Deep: How States Build Power Positions in Subsea Cable Networks

• In Event: Chinese Naval Power

Abstract

In 2020, the United States government successfully ousted China’s flagship cable builder from the construction of a 12,000-kilometer fiber-optic cable connecting Southeast Asia to Europe via the Middle East. In response, China’s government blocked a joint U.S.-Japan cable from passing through the South China Sea. In each case, officials cited concerns about exploitation, influence, and control by a foreign power; both concerned a private contract to expand core infrastructure sustaining the international economy. In addition to challenging the view that economic interdependence is a force for cooperation, these events recast a familiar puzzle: When and why do some rising powers upend the economic systems that enabled their ascents?

Undersea cables are widely seen as part of a larger struggle between the United States and China over technologies that could determine who achieves economic and military dominance for decades to come. However, even as these and other states are concerned about strategies to build up infrastructural advantages over their rivals, much remains unclear about the relationship between national power and global infrastructure and, in turn, the strategic consequences of overseas infrastructure development.

This paper brings a new analytic perspective to the debate. My focus is on what I call “competitive infrastructuring” – global infrastructure development characterized by security competition dynamics. Like others, I am interested in how states, especially challengers to a dominant power, use foreign infrastructure to advance strategic objectives. However, my aim is to show that undersea cables and other large-scale technology systems do more than transmit power resources and influence. For over 150 years, they have also created empirically identifiable networks that help to define, enable, and constrain behavior in the international system. My core contention is that the construction and operation of undersea cables defines – and potentially redefines – the relative positions states occupy in a global economic network, which shape strategic opportunities and alter the distribution of coercive power.

I develop my argument in two stages. I first clarify the relationship between power resources and network-based power and present a framework suitable for measuring quantitative and qualitative change in each over time. The framework developed here captures the ways states that are “resource-rich” but “network-insecure,” like contemporary China and Germany in the late nineteenth century, can advance their positions in network structures without resorting either to force – like the seizure of cable chokepoints – or compromise. It also takes account of particular features of cyber-physical communications systems as objects of dispute – a domain of increasing concern among military strategists, especially in East Asia.

Second, I argue that the network effects of infrastructural change help explain how, and when, rising powers upend the economic systems that enabled their ascents. Rising powers sometimes suffer severe restrictions on their access to finance and information networks. Other times they fear their communications with trading partners or political allies will be blocked or intercepted based on the experiences of other states targeted by a dominant power or rival. Fear of losing access to the networks needed to sustain their ascent can motivate large-scale overseas infrastructure projects that a less well-resourced or less insecure state might avoid. In doing so, they generate insecurity in more established states, who, fearing these same network effects turned against them, adopt increasingly confrontational measures. These interventions lead to an increasingly zero-sum competition in global infrastructure construction and connectivity.

To probe the plausibility of my framework, I employ original data on the undersea cable construction and connectivity to analyze all cases over the past 150 years in which a fast-growing great power occupied a disadvantaged network position. This analysis yields two main results. First, competitive infrastructuring is most likely to occur between two states that are relatively evenly matched in economic capabilities and starkly mismatched in terms of their relative network positions. Second, two main factors shape the extent to which a rising power resorts to infrastructural expansion in response to network insecurity: the disadvantaged power’s regime type and the salience of its coercive vulnerability. Authoritarians are more likely than democratic leaders to mobilize private infrastructure resources for political aims, and such mobilization is more likely in response to an acute (perceived) external threat to national communications.

Author

• Stuart Pike, UCLA