Neutrality is not a strategy

ON 17 March, during an address to the nation followed by a Q&A session, ITN journalist Sandari Ratnasuriya asked President Anura Kumara Dissanayake a question: Given that world powers are locked in a power struggle, how can Sri Lanka carry forward its non-aligned policy?

- Dr. Sanjana Hattotuwa

The President, speaking in his signature Sinhala cadence, responded by insisting that neutrality remains Sri Lanka’s defining posture, that the country had demonstrated this through its handling of the Iranian ship incident and at recent international conventions. He argued it was unsuitable for a country to “play around here and there for the benefit of each respective moment,” and declared non-alignment the “winning path.” Though his conviction was clear, strategic substance was less evident. A study of Canadian PM Carney’s Davos speech, alongside broader shifts in how many countries now frame foreign policy, places in sharp relief how outdated the President’s worldview is - rooted in post-Cold War vocabulary that no longer maps onto the world as it is, and will increasingly be.

Tripolarity

Nonalignment presumed a bipolar order. Two superpowers, two spheres of influence, and, for Sri Lanka, a refusal in principle, though not always exercised through policy, to orbit either one.

That architecture no longer even remotely exists. What has replaced it is not a new bipolarity between Washington and Beijing, or even a tripolarity including Moscow to the mix, but something messier, and in constant mutation - a polycentric system in which power disperses across multiple centres, coalitions form and dissolve around specific issues, and no single axis defines the choices available to smaller states. Nonalignment’s foundational logic, the refusal to choose between two blocs, answers a question nobody is asking anymore, because the operational logic, and blocs are gone. What remains are overlapping networks of competition, and cooperation that demand not some outdated notion of equidistance but active, calibrated engagement.