Commentary: Iran is pressing its strategic advantage by eyeing fees on undersea cables in Strait of Hormuz

TORONTO: The United States has unprecedented power to conduct military strikes anywhere around the world, to impose damaging tariffs and sanctions, and to mete out punishment far beyond its borders in coordination with allies. 

Few states have possessed so many instruments of coercion, and fewer still have been able to achieve so much leverage through private firms, foreign governments, and the networks of global exchange. But these tools are expensive to maintain, because they depend on preserving the order they exploit.

Applying force drains blood, treasure, and legitimacy. Tariffs and financial sanctions encourage alternative trade arrangements and payment systems. The alliances that magnify US pressure can give rise to burden-sharing disputes. No one doubts that the US is capable of tightening the vise on Iran. The question is whether using its positional advantages for that purpose would be worth the risk of weakening the order that gives American power its reach.

Iran, for its part, has few military and economic assets and few friends. But geography gives it something that America’s form of power rarely does: a way to impose costs while collecting rents. 

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has already sought to charge ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, turning transit into a source of revenue, and now Iranian officials and state-linked media have floated the idea of charging fees on the undersea cables beneath the same body of water.

Iran is not only threatening to interrupt global data flows but also probing a major private-sector vulnerability. After all, the US technology giants - Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft - are thoroughly entwined with the US state, and their cloud platforms and data centres depend on undersea connectivity.

Iran is treating geography not merely as a chokepoint, but as a rent-producing asset, extending the logic of Hormuz from oil tankers to other sectors. Shippers, insurers, and naval planners were already exposed to the strait, and now Iran wants to put cable owners, cloud providers, and technology platforms under similar pressure.

A GEOSTRATEGIC LOGIC

The geostrategic logic is obvious to anyone who looks at the submarine cable map. Cables close to Iran - including the FALCON, Gulf Bridge International/Middle East-North Africa, Kuwait-Iran, and UAE-Iran systems - run through the Gulf and near the Strait of Hormuz, placing digital infrastructure in the same contested area as tankers and naval patrols.

The geography matters because cables are not taxed where data is consumed, but where the infrastructure carrying it can be threatened. The companies most exposed may be American, but the vulnerability is not located in Silicon Valley or Seattle. It is concentrated at landing points, within territorial waters, and in narrow maritime approaches where states can turn permission into leverage. Iran’s proposal exploits this mismatch between the digital economy’s profits, which are global, and its weakest points, which remain localised.

This form of rentier power is different from the 20th-century model, which rested on ownership of oil, minerals, land, ports, and financial infrastructure. Iran has figured out that it does not need to own the flow of a critical good to gain an advantage; it only needs to threaten that flow at a single point.

Submarine cables highlight the hard physical reality that underpins digital life. Undersea networks are not invisible plumbing. The “cloud” does not actually resemble a cloud. They are old-fashioned infrastructure, routed through theaters of politics and power. The cloud has a seabed, and data flows depend on specific landing stations, repair ships, licenses, corporate owners, and security guarantees. That physical dependence makes cables attractive targets in modern conflict. Even temporary damage can have serious economic, military, and financial consequences.

THE NEXT STRATEGY

Hormuz is no longer simply open or closed. Selected ships have crossed, but only after entering various arrangements involving Iran. Access is being treated not as an established right but as a conditional privilege. Undersea cables are the next test of how far Iran can extend the rentier logic. 

This strategy does not require Iran to defeat the US or sever the world’s energy and data flows. To succeed, Iran only has to create enough uncertainty about those flows that predictability acquires a price.

The Trump administration will likely seek to make Iran’s price harder to collect by contesting tolling claims before they acquire legitimacy, working with insurers and Gulf states before panic drives up prices, and ensuring that repairs cannot be held hostage. Over time, the US can build resilience by expanding cable routes, landing points, and repair capacity, reducing the network’s dependence on any single passage near hostile states. The aim is not only to keep Hormuz open, but to make insecurity less profitable.

The cable-fee proposal may never become workable policy. But it reveals an ambition suited to Iran’s circumstances. Military and economic coercion usually costs the coercer as well as the target. Iran is looking for an option that both costs its adversary and generates revenue for itself. Unable to match America’s military or financial reach, Iran can still use geography to make the world pay to avoid a war.

Carla Norrlöf is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. This commentary first appeared on Project Syndicate.