Why the U.S. Just Declared War on Penguins Part Two

04/14/25 The Monday Blueprint: No stock market report because taxes, and the wire beneath the waves.

Apr 15, 2025

This is Part Two of a four-part investigation into the Penguin Tariff, what it hides, and who it benefits:

Part One: Penguins, Decimals, and AI-Generated Trade Policy
How weird math, suspiciously clean numbers, and an eerily ChatGPT-esque formula might suggest the first policy designed not by AI, but to look like it was.
Part Two: The Wire Beneath the Waves
We’ll dive deep (literally) into the undersea cable routes, satellite ground stations, and obscure geopolitical choke points that link these islands—not to penguins, but to power.
Part Three: The Paper Islands
A forensic look at tax havens, shell companies, and money laundering networks embedded within these remote territories. These places aren’t empty—they’re useful.
Part Four: The Why
What if the tariffs aren’t about trade at all? We’ll explore how tariff codes act as soft sanctions, signal flares, and legal scaffolding for something far more calculated—and far more dangerous.

The Wire Beneath the Waves

Perched on a volcanic seamount in the Indian Ocean, Christmas Island is a 52-square-mile limestone plateau ringed by cliffs and jungle, technically owned by Australia. But you can’t drive there. You can’t island-hop. Just over 1,600 residents live in small settlements with names like Flying Fish Cove and Silver City, which sound like Bond villain lairs but mostly house tired government workers, crab-migration researchers, and long-frustrated locals who’ve spent decades trying to untangle the bureaucratic Kafka-puzzle of being Australian citizens governed by federal departments run out of Canberra, but subject to Western Australian law, enforced by federal police, with zero state-level representation. The cliffs are steep. The roads are narrow. There’s no birth ward. No independent press. The last big dream—a luxury casino resort built in the 1990s—died within five years. Now, the economy limps on bat poop and phosphate mining and government contracts.

And yet. In 2022, someone wired this forgotten outpost into the Australian mainland with a 60-terabit-per-second data line.

Sure, the cable replaced outdated satellite equipment and improved mobile service reliability for Christmas Island residents who’d long dealt with spotty internet, 2G speeds, and high costs. But a $170 million dollar upgrade for 1600 people? And then, last year 2024 Google’s Bosun cable quietly pinged through Christmas Island at a cost of exactly we don’t know because Google hasn’t said. But the Bosun cable is a significant part of the company’s larger multiple subsea and terrestrial cable systems with a total investment of approximately $1 billion. And yet, most people around the globe have never heard of Christmas Island.

Approximately 600 nautical miles southwest from Christmas—no ferry, no casual crossing—rests West Island, capital of the Cocos (Keeling Islands), population 120. A thin strip of coral and sand barely five miles long dotted with coconut palms, shallow lagoons. Some low-rise government buildings, a tiny tiny school, a weather station, and a pub. An airstrip slices the island in half like too much rolled out duct tape. This is a logistical village with ocean views.

And in 2023, Australia committed over $200 million to upgrade the airstrip to handle the long-range P-8a Poseidon, the suburban dad of military aircraft, a souped-up 737 with torpedoes, depth charges, harpoon missiles. A listening device with wings, a submarine hunter. Additionally, Australia runs a covert satellite interception and monitoring station on West Island.

While not as wired as Christmas Island (yet), West Island is suspected to be next in line for fiber optic integration—possibly linked to military-grade redundancy projects. Nothing on West Island looks dangerous, but with the continued, ongoing upgrades, this innocuous island 2000 miles closer to everything than mainland Australia becomes a front-line military base.

Spin the globe 8000 miles north and a few dozen degrees colder, you find penguins, polar bears, permafrost, antennas, and Musk.

Svalbard, a windswept archipelago, known for polar bears, seed vaults, and the kind of icy silence you can market to sci-fi directors. Glaciers, science stations. A handful of hardy civilians living in Longyearbyen—the northernmost permanent settlement in the world. And although officially a part of Norway, the island is governed under its own international treaty, operating in a legal grey zone. Demilitarized by law and crawling with antennas and satellite dishes that talk to everything from weather satellites to low-Earth-orbit constellations.

And from Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland stretch two undersea cables stretch 1,375 kilometers, caring the satellite data into Europe’s digital bloodstream. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s empire touches down in Svalbard every ninety minutes. SpaceX’s Starlink infrastructure supports real-time relays from polar-orbiting satellites, syncing sky to sea. At this point, Svalbard is less town, less island and more router.

Starlink orbits 342 miles above in low-Earth orbit. On a clear night here in New Hampshire, you can sometimes spot the 5,500 satellite constellation of glittering mesh moving across the sky. Tens of thousands more table-sized Starlink satellites have been approved for launch. Latency is low. Speeds are high. Setup is plug-and-play: a pizza-box dish, a router, and a credit card; no fiber and no tower. Plus, Starlink moves with you in cars, RVs, planes, boats. Farmers use Starlink to monitor irrigation pumps. Scientists livestream research. And the U.S. Military too—the Army, Navy, Air Force, Special Ops—all of them have integrated into Starlink.

That kind of dependency introduces a new kind of weakness because this is a privately owned, privately governed, privately controlled network functioning as a critical piece of national defense. There is no congressional oversight and no public guarantee. If Starlink went dark tomorrow—because of sabotage, bankruptcy, blackmail, or boredom—American military communication could flicker.

And you know as well as I do that both Ukraine and Russia use Starlink in combat. And Musk has publicly floated the idea of limiting access to Starlink if he disagrees with how the system is being used. He’s implied the right to pick a side. Not as a sovereign state. Not even as a defense contractor. But as… himself, a man with a Wi-Fi kill switch, and an opinion.

This is not the first time a private actor has armed two factions and watched the war from a safe distance. We as a nation have certainly funded both sides of more conflicts than we like to admit—selling weapons to regimes we later invade, training fighters we later declare enemies, building infrastructure for allies who become adversaries. But there was at least a pretense of policy. A chain of command. Debate. Congressional hearings. Receipts.

Starlink skips all of that with war at the speed of subscription.

Christmas Island. West Island. Svalbard. All three sit at the intersection of obscure sovereignty, global telecom, and what I haven’t said yet--increasing Chinese presence. China has research outposts, infrastructure partnerships, port access, or scientific stations in every single one. Quietly. Legally. But undeniably. Each island now a node in the U.S.-China standoff. And if the ~~U.S.~~ Elon Musk wants a war—or just leverage—data chokepoints are the modern version of naval blockades.

And in case that sounds abstract, remember: we’ve already seen the line cut.

In January 2022, one of the two undersea cables connecting Svalbard to mainland Norway was severed. A Russian fishing vessel crossed the cable’s path over a hundred times in the weeks before. Norway never confirmed sabotage. But no one needed them to. And a few months later, another undersea cable between the Shetland Islands and the Faroe Islands. Another trawler. Another wire.

This is how a new kind of war starts: not with missiles or tanks, but with snips. With choke points going quiet. With just enough deniability to avoid headlines, but not enough to avoid consequences.

And when the fiber goes down—when it’s not a glitch but a message—there’s only one network left that can fill the gap.

Privately owned. Unregulated. Profitable.