Can Iran Control Internet Cables in the Gulf?

AI generated undersea internet cables

We’ve previously discussed the vulnerabilities of global internet infrastructure, but today we’ll focus on subsea data cables in the Persian Gulf.

Global data traffic depends on undersea cables that carry massive amounts of information between continents. Iran has now decided it wants the ability to control and charge for data traffic moving through the region (mirroring its stance on shipping through the Strait). Many Gulf countries built separate subsea infrastructure, so all of them are exposed to disruption.

These vulnerabilities will likely push more communications toward satellite systems like Starlink, but that opens a whole new set of challenges. Another reminder of the fragility of globalization.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the winery of Tenuta Oderisio in, where am I? Abruzzo in Italy. Today we’re going to talk about a little thing in the Persian Gulf called data cables. Now, for those of you who have ever sent an email, there’s got to be a way for you to access the internet, for the information packets to get from X to Y to Z, and eventually to where you need them to go. 

Now, there’s a number of ways you can do this. You can piggyback on the telephonic network. That’s a relatively new method using, say, 5G or 4G signals. Older school. For those of you who are Gen X or boomers, you remember, of course, modems where it went over the telephone lines that were physical at the time rather than wired. 

But if you want to go across the planet, there’s this little problem called the ocean, and there is no cell signal that is strong enough to get across. So you have to do one of two things. Number one, you bounce up to a satellite with something called Starlink, which is really the only model that does it right now, which has a cost and a hardware issue. 

Or you send it into the telephone network, and eventually it gets to a launching point on the coast and loads into a data cable that crosses the ocean to a spot on the other side. I think it’s loaded into their telephonic network, these data cables, there’s literally thousands of them, and the big trunk ones just carry a huge amount of data. 

Typically, one of them that crosses the ocean carries more data or has more capacity carry data than all of the telephonic systems just 25 years ago. Now, what is going on in the Persian Gulf is that the Iranians, who are trying to assert control and sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz in order to get control of the oil trade, are not limiting their ambitions to that. 

They’re going after container ships, they’re going after Bulgars, they’re going after food carriers, and they’re going after the internet cables. And they’re now saying that they think they should be able to charge a transit feed for any data flowing in and out of the Persian Gulf. Now you look at a map of the Persian Gulf, and you’ve got a lot of Arab countries on the western side Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, gutter, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. 

But something that everybody forgets is all of these countries really don’t like one another, and some of them would just flat out hate one another. So they, whenever possible, try not to make their national infrastructure dependent upon what happens in the next country. Over. So the United Arab Emirates, for example, doesn’t have a data cable that crosses Saudi Arabia and goes up to Jordan and into Israel and then on to Europe. 

And no, no, no, their only access is out into the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz on a subsea cable. The same for Kuwait, the same for gutter, the same for Bahrain. Which means that if you take a country like the UAE, which is actually reasonably well run and not nearly as medieval and thudded like, say, Saudi Arabia, they’re completely vulnerable to this sort of blackmail. 

And if you play this forward into a world, you have to realize that data cables can’t be defended and they can’t dodge. So anyone who decides they want to go after them can really sever them in a day if they want to. So the transmission system that we have become used to, that we don’t think of as a globalized thing, is actually one of the most hyper globalized aspects of physical infrastructure that exists on the planet today. 

And in the Strait of Hormuz right now, we are getting a glimpse of what to come when data connections that are allowed upon physical connections simply aren’t going to be viable long term. And that only leaves satellites. And that starts a different conversation about sovereignty and space and the ability to defend that sort of network. Because Starlink is already in the thousands of satellites, that already makes it more populous and orbit in terms of number of satellites than everything else put together, that is also not sustainable, but we’ll deal with that on a different day.

Russia’s Ukraine War Lessons Are Hitting the Gulf

Qatar and Persian Gulf Region on a Map | Photo licensed by Envato Elements

Russia is taking what they’ve learned on the battlefield in the Ukraine War and sharing that with Iran. This is not a new strategy for the Russians, but it is already spelling trouble for the US.

Iran’s Shahed deployment and targeting are improving, thanks to tactics like launching swarms of drones with varying flight paths. These strategies are rapidly exhausting missile defenses in the Persian Gulf.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Okay. Today we’re going to talk about drone targeting specifically in the context of Iran. And there Shaheed. So last week we learned, you know, shocked anyone who’s been paying attention that the Russians have been providing the Iranians with targeting information since the beginning of the war. The Russians have been providing all of America’s foes with targeting information, going back to the early days of the war on terror. 

That’s not a surprise. But what’s come out in the last 24 hours, roughly, is the degree to which the Russians are sharing their war lessons that they’ve learned at the expense of the Ukrainians in the Ukraine war. So the weapons system in play is an Iranian shaheed. It’s a really stupid drone where you have a small Nand chip that’s a slow memory chip that doesn’t necessarily require power to hold on to its memory. 

You program in a preset parameter preset flight route and it flies from A to B following the course you’ve identified. And then if it’s a really advanced shithead and most of them are at it, then can execute a very limited decision tree. Like is this a car or is that a boat? Is that a tree or do I want to hit and it’ll try to hit one of those things. 

Otherwise it just kind of angles down and crashes into something. Well, what the Russians have learned is that if they take their heads and fly them in groups in batches, that, not only ensures that one of them will get through air defense, it makes it actually harder for the air defense to pick out an individual target. So oftentimes you have to fire more interceptors than you would if they just came at you one at a time. 

The additional thing that the Russians are sharing is kind of a weave strategy, because you can preprogram in the route. What you do is you preprogram in a slightly different route for each head. So they kind of weave in and out of formation up, down, left, right, whatever it happens to be. That makes it much harder for air defense to kind of get a lock. 

And you have to use even more interceptors. And we now know that that specific strategy that they developed for dealing with Ukrainians has now been applied to Iranian showerheads that are being used against American and allied targets in the Persian Gulf. The issue here, of course, is pretty straightforward and short term. The western Gulf is running out of interceptors, and anything that forces the defenders to use more and more of them while the shitheads just keep coming, means that the time where they actually run out of Anti-drone weaponry is coming upon us very, very quickly, perhaps as little as a week or two. 

We don’t know the specific number because the Western Gulf is are consider the number of interceptors they have used and the number they have left to be national security secrets. So it’s kind of a just a guessing game. But there were only about 2000 of them total at the beginning of the war. Or it’s been going on for two weeks. 

And we know that the Iranians have fired at least 2000 shitheads at this point, probably closer to 3000. And they just keep coming. So we’re very close to the point where the Western Gulf is going to run out of defensive firepower and courtesy of the Russians, they’re going to have pretty good targeting information. Just come on in and hit whatever they want.

Global Energy at the End of the World

My fourth book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization is scheduled for release on June 14. In coming weeks we will be sharing graphics and excerpts, along with info on how to preorder.

Former Soviet states supply over 14 percent of the world’s energy. In this graphic from my new book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning, I ask the question: how long can former Soviet Union countries’ oil production last without Western technological assistance? Russia has invaded Ukraine and, just like that, we are going to find out the answer. With both Western oil majors and service companies heading for the door, we are already seeing lowered oil production. At the time of writing, the International Energy Agency forecasts that from May, nearly 3 million barrels a day in Russian production will be turned off.
 
With Russia’s production dimming, the world will look to the Persian Gulf for more oil and gas. Turning to the Persian Gulf, however, is simply swapping one conflict zone for another. Four-fifths of the Persian Gulf’s supply transits the Strait of Hormuz to reach its destination. Piracy can always be an issue. High food and agricultural input costs increase the possibility of social unrest in the region. In short, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine further destabilized an already unstable market.
 
As you can see, NAFTA supplies more gas and oil than it consumes, which is the ideal scenario. On the other hand, Europe, excluding the former Soviet states, cannot domestically satisfy its energy needs and is forced to rely on increasingly unstable import sources. Northeast Asia is in the same, if not more dire, boat. The EU at least has navies large enough to go out and secure its own oil. In Northeast Asia, only Japan has this capability.
 
To learn more on this topic make sure to look out for my upcoming book, which will be released June 14. We encourage those who can to preorder by clicking on the link below.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
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Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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The State Of The Pandemic: The Persian Gulf

You can also read the State of the Pandemic series’ take on the United States, Latin America, East Asia, Europe, and the BRICS. . 

Outside of China, Iran was the world’s first significant coronavirus epicenter, and it is pretty obvious that tight geopolitical and economic relations among the two – reinforced by American sanctions – served as a vector for COVID’s transmission from Wuhan to Tehran. China has been stingy with accurate COVID data with the entire world, Iran included. Because of this, Iran was not able to properly prepare for the virus. As one might expect, this meant Iranian support of all things Chinese plummeted.
 
Iran is also the first country to show the limitations of quarantine efforts. As a developing country, there is only so much social distancing that a country like Iran can engage in. The Iranian economy cannot provide its workers with extensive, open-ended work from home; grocery delivery is not an option for a society still largely dependent on government-subsidized goods; Iran’s cultural and religious tradition is centered around communal gathering (like in many other countries, religious centers like Qom have been ground zero for super spreader events). Yes, the country’s anti-COVID efforts had an impact, but the surprise and speed with which coronavirus struck the country means the Iranians have no hope of being COVID-free until there is a mass vaccination program. The situation is going to get (much) worse before it gets better.
 
And that’s the good news for the region. For on the other side of the Persian Gulf, the situation is far, far, far worse.
 
As we noted in early April, the question wasn’t so much if the Arab Persian Gulf states would have a coronavirus crisis, but when. Two months later, the region’s epidemic is by far the worst in the world on a per capita basis.

(Many, many thanks to the Financial Times for providing the data interface that makes this graphic possible. You can visualize your own data pulls here.)
 
There are several structural factors at play here:
 
The Arabs of the Persian Gulf aren’t “typical” populations. For the most part, they are maintained and sustained by oil income. Their governments provide hefty subsidies for all aspects of their lives, which means many citizens don’t work. Since the local climate is the part of the world that most resembles the surface of the sun, air conditioning is a must-have. The result? Nearly everyone lives in densely populated cities that boast extensive high-rises, housing blocks, multi-generational homes, and omnipresent indoor social interaction options. Think of these as less cities, and more ginormous cruise ships that just happen to not move.
 
Of course, just because the locals don’t work doesn’t mean that there isn’t work that needs to be done. The entire region depends upon a large, poorly documented pool of foreign workers who are often confined to dormitory-style housing. Think of how workers in American meatpacking plants are brought in from Central America and boarded in bunkhouses. Think of how that makes coronavirus transmission inevitable. Now apply that model to all workers in all industries. Honestly, it is a not-so-small miracle this region’s epidemic isn’t worse.
 
Two other factors are worthy of note:
 
First, the Islamic world recently exited Ramadan. Among the many characteristics of the Muslim holy month are communal prayer, family reconnecting and feasting after sunset. Think Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas combined, but lasting for a month. As it typically takes three to five weeks for significant exposure events to impact COVID testing data, and that Ramadan ended May 23, expect regional caseloads to seriously explode in July.
 
Second, and perhaps most problematic, when the state pays you to stay indoors and eat, you don’t get much exercise. The region’s per capita rates of obesity, diabetes, heart, and pulmonary diseases are among the world’s highest (if not for high per capital health spending, they probably would be the highest). These are exactly the sort of pre-existing conditions that make COVID more likely to kill you.

Newsletters from Zeihan on Geopolitics have always been and always will be free of charge. However, if you enjoy them or find them useful, please consider showing your appreciation via a donation to Feeding America.
 
One of the biggest problems the United States faces at present is food dislocation: pre-COVID, nearly 40% of all foods were not consumed at home. Instead, they were destined for places like restaurants and college dorms. Shifting the supply chain to grocery stores takes time and money, but people need food now. Some 23 million students used to be on school lunches, for example. That servicing has evaporated. Feeding America helps bridge the gap between America’s food supply (which remains robust) and its demand (which coronavirus has shifted faster than the supply chains can keep up).
 
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