South Asia is being remade, and Sri Lanka has a smaller margin for error in navigating it than its leaders sometimes admit.
The past eighteen months have brought the region closer to open conflict, mass political upheaval, and great-power competition than at any point since the end of the Cold War. In May 2025, India and Pakistan came within days of full-scale war after New Delhi launched Operation Sindoor in retaliation for the Pahalgam terror attack, the most dangerous India-Pakistan crisis since the 2019 Balakot strikes. Months later, Pakistan and Afghanistan traded airstrikes along the Durand Line, with a ceasefire that collapsed within 48 hours. Bangladesh and Nepal, meanwhile, were convulsed by Gen Z-led political revolts that toppled governments almost overnight. This is the neighbourhood Colombo now has to read, and read correctly.
Sri Lanka likes to describe its foreign policy as neutral, non-aligned, and equidistant from the major powers. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said as much after his 2024 election victory, insisting the island would not be drawn into any geopolitical camp. In practice, the record of the past two years shows a government pulled in several directions at once — and the contradictions are becoming harder to paper over.
Pulled toward Delhi, tied to Beijing
Despite the National People’s Power’s historical suspicion of Indian influence, Dissanayake’s first state visit as president was to New Delhi, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2025 trip to Colombo produced seven bilateral agreements, including a grid interconnectivity pact and an energy hub deal for Trincomalee. Analysts at the National Bureau of Asian Research argue this tilt has less to do with ideological affinity than with India’s willingness to apply steady pressure on its smallest neighbour to limit Chinese footholds on the island.
Yet Colombo has hardly turned its back on Beijing. A January 2025 joint statement with Chinese President Xi Jinping saw Sri Lanka explicitly endorse Beijing’s position on Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang, the first time a Sri Lankan government has extended the One China framework this far, a shift flagged by regional strategic analysts as a departure from genuine non-alignment. Fifteen memoranda of understanding followed, including a $3.7 billion Hambantota oil refinery that will bring more Chinese shipping into the port China already leases on a 99-year term.
Then came March 2026, when Colombo denied the United States landing rights at Mattala International Airport during the opening days of the US-Israel-Iran conflict. The government framed the refusal as strict neutrality; outside observers were less convinced. One assessment concluded the decision reflected a deeper tilt toward Beijing’s orbit rather than principled equidistance, noting that Sri Lanka’s territorial commitments to China under the 2025 joint statement leave little practical room for deepening security cooperation with Washington.
Why this matters beyond diplomacy
None of this is abstract for ordinary Sri Lankans. The island remains under an IMF programme that has delivered further disbursements this year even as the cost of living climbs and gas shortages return uncomfortably reminiscent of 2022. Every hedge Colombo makes between Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi carries a price tag, whether in restructured debt terms, port concessions, or diplomatic capital spent placating one capital while reassuring another.
The wider region offers little comfort. A regional security analysis published this year describes South Asia as one of the most volatile security complexes in the international system, defined by the entrenched India-Pakistan rivalry, Afghanistan’s chronic instability, and smaller states caught in the middle. China’s expanding footprint compounds this: research tracking Beijing’s regional influence has documented growing PRC leverage across telecoms, education, and infrastructure in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan alike, leverage that does not disappear because a government in Colombo calls itself non-aligned.
The choice ahead
Sri Lanka’s post-independence foreign policy tradition, the idea of being, as successive leaders have put it, a friend to all and an enemy of none remains sound in principle. But principle is not the same as strategy, and a detailed review of the NPP government’s record suggests Colombo’s foreign policy has so far been reactive rather than deliberate: a series of individual transactions with India, China, Japan, and the Gulf states rather than a coherent doctrine of strategic autonomy.
That distinction matters more now than at any point in recent memory. As one assessment of the government’s first year in office put it, the NPP has tried to project the island as a neutral, sovereign actor in the Indo-Pacific while avoiding alignment with any single power, a goal every Sri Lankan government since independence has shared, and one that has grown harder to sustain with each passing year of great-power competition.
Sri Lanka does not have the luxury of sitting out the realignment under way in South Asia. Its location astride the Indian Ocean’s busiest shipping lanes guarantees that Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi will keep competing for influence over Colombo’s ports, airports, and votes at multilateral forums, whether or not Sri Lankan leaders wish it so. The question is not whether the island will be courted — it already is — but whether its government can convert that attention into leverage for the country, rather than simply managing the optics of neutrality one MoU at a time.
If Colombo wants genuine strategic autonomy rather than the appearance of it, it will need something the past two years have largely lacked: a public, coherent statement of what national interest actually requires, and the discipline to measure every agreement with Delhi, Beijing, Washington, or Tokyo that against that standard rather than against the immediate pressure of the moment.
