Two ports, three thousand kilometres apart, are quietly telling the same story about where the Indian Ocean is headed. One is Gwadar, on Pakistan’s Balochistan coast, built and operated with heavy Chinese involvement as the maritime terminus of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The other is Hambantota, on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, leased to a Chinese state firm since 2017 and periodically at the centre of standoffs over which foreign naval and research vessels may dock there. Neither country set out to become a fixed point on someone else’s strategic map. Both now are.
That is not an accident of geography so much as a consequence of how the Indian Ocean itself has changed. What was once viewed mainly as a shipping lane has become, in the words of one recent assessment, the “fifth domain” of great-power competition, pulled between Chinese naval expansion stretching from Djibouti through the Maldives to Sri Lanka, American pressure on India to align more firmly against Iran, and a regional energy and minerals dependency that leaves almost every littoral state exposed. Sri Lanka’s ports are not incidental to this picture; they are one of its clearest illustrations.
Colombo has lived this tension directly. The 2022 docking of the Chinese tracking vessel Yuan Wang 5 at Hambantota was delayed after India and the United States raised concerns, and Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry ultimately let it proceed only after both sides agreed the ship would keep its identification systems switched on and refrain from research activity in Sri Lankan waters. The following year, after a similar controversy over the survey ship Shiyan 6, Colombo imposed a one-year moratorium on foreign research vessels entering its waters altogether — a moratorium framed publicly as capacity-building, but understood by most observers as a response to New Delhi’s discomfort. When the ban lapsed, Indian officials made their position plain: at the December 2024 summit, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri noted that Colombo was “looking at” the issue and stressed the sensitivity of India’s security interests in the matter. Sri Lankan analysts have since argued that Colombo should build its own technical standard operating procedures, rather than relying on assurances that its territory won’t be used against India as a substitute for genuine independent capacity.
Pakistan’s experience with Gwadar is the same dynamic playing out on a larger and more militarised scale. Beijing and Islamabad describe their relationship as an “iron brotherhood,” and the substance behind the phrase now includes intelligence sharing, arms sales, and a naval partnership explicitly built around securing Chinese commercial shipping and energy imports that pass close to the Strait of Hormuz. Gwadar is widely expected to become China’s second overseas naval facility after Djibouti, and joint exercises such as Sea Guardian have already tested anti-submarine coordination between the two navies. For Pakistan, this has bought infrastructure, financing, and a diplomatic backer at the UN Security Council. It has also meant that Pakistan’s own maritime posture is now read by everyone else — India above all — through the lens of Chinese strategy rather than Pakistani interest.
The costs of that arrangement are becoming harder for Pakistan to ignore on its own terms. Nearly all of the country’s trade moves through a small cluster of ports, and Pakistani strategists have begun warning that the country needs an independent Indian Ocean policy framework rather than one dictated by the US-China rivalry playing out along its coastline, given how exposed its exclusive economic zone and sea lanes are to a great-power arms race it did not choose. Islamabad’s western maritime flank, in other words, is now entangled with a partnership so deep that disentangling Pakistani from Chinese interests in the Arabian Sea has become almost impossible, a lesson Colombo should study closely before its own arrangements harden into something similarly irreversible.
Layered on top of this is the unresolved India-Pakistan rivalry itself, which flared again in 2025 after a terror attack in Indian-administered Kashmir left dozens dead and prompted Indian strikes on alleged militant infrastructure inside Pakistan, a limited but genuinely destabilising clash between two nuclear-armed states. Every time that rivalry resurfaces, it hardens New Delhi’s instinct to treat the entire Indian Ocean rim, Sri Lanka very much included, as a theatre where Chinese and Pakistani presence must be watched and, where possible, pre-empted. Sri Lanka’s port decisions do not happen in a vacuum; they happen inside this wider India-Pakistan-China triangle, whether Colombo asks for that role or not.
None of this means Sri Lanka should treat Beijing or New Delhi as adversaries to be kept at arm’s length in equal measure that binary has rarely served small states well. It means recognising that the Gwadar precedent is a warning about what happens when a strategically located port becomes so central to one great power’s naval planning that the host country’s own room for manoeuvre quietly shrinks. Sri Lanka is not Pakistan, and Hambantota is not Gwadar. But the pattern connecting them critical infrastructure, heavy Chinese financing, an anxious regional power next door, and a host government trying to hedge without over-committing is close enough that Colombo has every reason to study Islamabad’s experience rather than repeat it by default.
The practical answer is not another moratorium announced under pressure and quietly reversed a few months later. It is the harder, less dramatic work of building Sri Lanka’s own technical and legal capacity to evaluate every foreign vessel, port lease, and infrastructure deal on its own merits capacity that does not depend on Indian assurances, Chinese financing terms, or American strategic anxieties to define what is and isn’t acceptable in Sri Lankan waters. Pakistan’s experience at Gwadar suggests how costly it becomes to build that capacity only after the deeper entanglement is already in place.
