November 08, 2023
Did China and Russia just sabotage critical infrastructure in the Baltic?
During the past several weeks, a string of attacks on critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea has highlighted the challenges NATO faces in protecting itself against hybrid threats. After the discovery of damage done to a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia, news soon broke that a data cable connecting Estonia and Sweden had also been damaged. While investigations point to a Chinese commercial vessel as the most likely culprit, the difficulty of attributing the incident directly to Beijing illustrates a common problem in defending against grey zone aggression more broadly. On this episode of Brussels Sprouts, Bruce Jones and Elisabeth Braw join Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jim Townsend to help us make sense of recent incidents and what they can tell us about future threats posed by hybrid warfare.
Bruce Jones is a Senior Fellow with the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
Elisabeth Braw is a Senior Associate Fellow at the European Leadership Network and a columnist with Foreign Policy. Her work focuses on deterrence against emerging forms of aggression, such as hybrid and grey zone threats.
More from CNAS
-
Ukraine Negotiations: Prospects and Pitfalls of Peace
Podcast
This week Brussels Sprouts breaks down the latest negotiations on Ukraine. American officials told reporters that they had resolved or closed gaps around 90 percent of their d...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Jim Townsend
-
Podcast
Transatlantic Security / Middle East Security
The Russia-Iran Partnership: A Geopolitical Balancing ActIt has been almost a year since Russia and Iran signed their comprehensive strategic partnership. That deal established a 20-year partnership between the two countries coverin...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Jim Townsend
-
Commentary
Defense / Transatlantic Security
Ukraine’s Catch-22 MomentThis article was originally published in the Financial Times. In Joseph Heller’s wartime classic, Catch-22, the protagonist Yossarian seeks out the US army surgeon Doc Daneeka...
By Franz-Stefan Gady
-
Commentary
Transatlantic Security / Middle East Security / Energy, Economics & Security
Sanctions Aren’t Enough to Shut Down the Moscow-Tehran Black Market for WarThe geographic scope and extent of Iranian-Russian cooperation highlights the failure of traditional sanctions to prevent Moscow and Tehran from seeking key components like ch...
By Delaney Soliday
