“It’s important not to overlook Sri Lanka,” Wilson Center South Asia Institute Director Michael Kugelman notes in the latest Foreign Policy South Asia Brief. “In the last two years,” he adds, Sri Lanka has “successfully navigated global conflict and great-power rivalry”. 

In the longer term, this balancing act may or may not entail costs for the country. Kugelman, however, doesn’t ponder on that: instead, he reflects on Sri Lanka as an example of “the capacity of states in the Global South to reinforce multipolarity”.

How exactly has multipolarity been reinforced? More importantly, what is this multipolarity? For Kugelman, it entails refusing to condemn Russia despite the Russia-Ukraine war being a major external catalyst for Sri Lanka’s economic crisis, expressing solidarity with Palestinians while engaging with Israel, and sending vessels to the US-led naval campaign against the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea while strengthening ties with China. 

It’s a tricky balancing act, but somehow, Sri Lanka has managed to pull it off.

Perhaps the best recent example of this is the sight of Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena rushing off to Beijing. This was just three months after Sri Lanka imposed a year-long moratorium on research vessels – a ban obviously aimed at China. Yet Gunawardena was able to secure assurances from Beijing regarding debt restructuring.

A different kind of foreign policy 

Certainly, Sri Lanka stands out as a unique example of a different kind of foreign policy. At first glance, this foreign policy seems to be based on ideological considerations: what else can explain President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s passionate pleas on behalf of the Palestinians or his snide remarks about Ukraine to the collective West? 

Yet it is in fact rooted in what Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, at a recent Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute (LKI) seminar on nonalignment, called “enlightened self-interest”. We are condemning Israel, but we are also engaging with it. We are mum over Ukraine, but we are also hosting Ukrainian tourists in our midst.

Interestingly, unlike many foreign policy experts, Kugelman does not view nonalignment as contrary to such self-interest: he does not call for its burial, as a Sri Lankan MP did in the late 1990s. For him, it is nonalignment which has enabled South Asian countries to maximise their “diplomatic flexibility” and “operate independently on the world stage”. In fact, he equates it with strategic autonomy, the policy associated with India, Pakistan, Türkiye, and France. However, how accurate is it to rank Sri Lanka in that league?

Strategic autonomy 

To give credit where it is due, these countries have managed to evolve a foreign policy capable of adjusting to a highly-chimeric world order. Their actions can seem unpredictable, inconsistent, and jerky: after more than a year of maintaining a stony silence over Ukraine, for instance, French President Emmanuel Macron called for greater European unity against Russia. His remarks had a rather predictable effect: Russia responded angrily to them, while his European and American critics chose to ignore them.

Yet, paradoxically, it is through that unpredictability and inconsistency that these states have found a niche for themselves, even if it has won them few friends: as Anchal Vohra notes in Foreign Policy, par exemple, France’s European policy “flatters France and annoys everyone else”. The same can be said of India’s recent actions, in particular Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks about Katchatheevu and, much earlier, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar’s remarks about Europe’s problems no longer being the world’s problems.

At the same time, in foreign policy as in everything else, it’s important not to compare apples with oranges. These countries have been able to manoeuvre themselves so well – at least in the eyes of those who think so – because they have the clout and influence that others do not. In their case, strategic autonomy stems from, and is not independent of, that influence. 

This is not necessarily dependent on geography or size: New Zealand, a country with a fifth of Sri Lanka’s population, is probably the best example – outside of Central Asia and Scandinavia, much bigger regions – of a country lodged between rival powers that has been able to evolve a foreign policy which meets its strategic interests.

The case of Sri Lanka 

Where does that leave Sri Lanka? We need to consider that it is still recovering from a massive economic crisis – and, more importantly, that it was hardly in better shape before that crisis hit. 

Seemingly, after committing numerous foreign policy blunders, it has regained common sense and is now embracing its own variant of strategic autonomy. Today, in this reading of things, it has reduced its reliance on one specific major power and is hedging its bets on all of them, walking on a tightrope which has enabled it to secure benefits from everyone without alienating or angering anyone.

By implication, Kugelman has ranked Sri Lanka alongside India and Pakistan. One could add France to the list. But it is important to acknowledge that Sri Lanka is acting the way it does because it lacks the clout and the power that these other countries possess. 

Comparing the one to all others is tantamount to a false equivalence: it equates the Sri Lankan experience with the Indian and Pakistani, when these countries lie a league or two away. Moreover, these comparisons downplay the domestic compulsions that are specific and unique to Sri Lanka and have an indelible impact on its foreign policy.

In other words, if countries like India, Pakistan, New Zealand, Uzbekistan, Türkiye, and France behave the way they do because of the power and influence they enjoy, Sri Lanka is behaving as it does because of its lack of such power.

As this columnist has noted before, Sri Lanka is perhaps the only small state in the world which neighbours a regional hegemon and, at the same time, lies in close proximity to that hegemon’s biggest geopolitical rival. It is paradoxically because of such limitations that Sri Lanka has been forced to put its eggs in every basket. What looks like strategic autonomy for some can thus be construed as strategic ambiguity – or worse, as ‘strategic aimlessness’. What looks like an example of Sri Lanka’s strength can, accordingly, be an illustration of its weakness. There is really nothing to celebrate in this.

(The writer is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk)