Editorial

It was ‘somebody else’s war’. The three-cornered fighting between USA-Israel and Iran that broke out last week began expanding to the rest of the West Asian region dragging not only Iran’s immediate pro-US neighbours, but also European nations – the UK, France, Greece and Cyprus — and Azerbaijan – into a second war not of their choosing.

And then, on Wednesday, March 4, Sri Lanka also got sucked in when a torpedo fired from a US submarine sank an Iranian naval frigate off the southern seas of Sri Lanka.

It also struck the Sri Lankan Government diplomatically. It froze. The Navy, however, moved swiftly to rescue those who survived the blast.

A second warship was also in trouble. For hours the Government dithered on what to do when the vessel sent distress signals. Even if there was a clear drill in the naval playbook, it was waiting for orders as the Government studied international law on its ‘neutrality’ stand.

The incidents were wrapped up in an unusually orchestrated late evening ‘media briefing’ by the President at which handpicked media were present, and which left more questions than answers – did Sri Lanka, or more to the point, neighbour India – the self-acclaimed ‘net security provider’ and ‘first responder’ in the region, and Quad partner of the USA – have any knowledge of a US submarine in the Indian Ocean and within Sri Lanka’s Economic Zone (EEZ)? Has any protest been lodged by Colombo with Washington on this grave incident, described boastfully by the US War Minister as the first submarine attack since the Second World War, which took place in Sri Lanka’s EEZ?

The President spoke of Sri Lanka’s humanity which he said was the principal consideration in coming to the rescue of the Iranian crew, but by the time Sri Lanka displayed its humanity, scores of Iranians had died.  So far neither Sri Lanka nor India, have expressed condolences on the deaths of the Iranian crew members who were visiting the Indian Ocean as guests of the Indian government and hail from a friendly non-aligned country.

If the US action was a forward deployment of its strength in the Indian Ocean, contradicting the objectives of the architecture of the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’; China – its prime concern, must be quietly drawing the right conclusions in the legal, diplomatic and strategic precedents created.

Modern Iran is anything but a model nation-state itself. The Islamic Republic’s flaw was that it could not match its chest-thumping anti-US, anti-Israel rhetoric with its military capabilities. Round after round, it was getting decimated with precision targeting of its politicians, military commanders and even scientists. The frequent “Death to America” war cry boomeranged with death upon its own soldiers and citizens.

The ongoing military strikes on Iran have nothing really to do with its nuclear so-called weapons programme. President Trump himself bragged after the June 2025 aerial hits on Iran’s purported nuclear sites that it was ‘game over’. If so, then why target non-existent locations again. The independent international watchdog, the UN’s IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) has confirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons programme. While the world knows Israel has a programme shrouded in a policy of nuclear ambiguity.

While the ongoing war has upturned the world economy similar to the COVID pandemic years, the war in West Asia is beyond the control of Sri Lanka as President Anura K. Dissanayake told Parliament this week. He and his Government have played very safe and refrained from taking sides in the conflict neither condemning nor condoning only expressing sympathy for the unapologetic murder of a sovereign Head of State of a nation with whom Sri Lanka has long had friendly relations. Sri Lanka’s only concern till last Wednesday was the impact of the war on tourist arrivals, oil and gas supplies and prices, and the safety of its workers in the region, and the drop in remittances they would send.

There are two major takeaways from this continuing war. One is the collapse of the liberal idealist post-war international system based on the belief in international law and the prohibition on the use of force, along with a parallel rise in the realpolitik of power and force that was implicit in that very system.

Even the myth of the sovereign equality of states maintained by the UN and to which all countries subscribed (despite the nuclear armed, veto-wielding Security Council), is falling apart, and countries are making major shifts in their defence strategies. In the backdrop of an existential threat from an aggressive Russia at Europe’s borders and uncertainty of US security guarantees for Europe, French President Emmanuel Macron this week announced he would expand France’s nuclear umbrella to cover Europe – as a deterrent. He has reminded his European colleagues there is a need to be “nuclear prepared” for the future – “you must  be feared if you want to be free”.

We are already seeing a resurgence of an arms race enhanced by Artificial Intelligence powered weapons and Lethal Autonomous Weapons System (LAWS).

The other takeaway directly relates to Sri Lanka. All the countries in the Mediterranean, Gulf and West Asia that seemingly wanted to be neutral in this war and have got sucked into this expanded conflict are those who have provided military bases to foreign powers. This is exactly what can happen to this country in a clash between the military powers in the Indo-Pacific region – a result of the signing multiple MoUs with foreign countries by Sri Lankan governments, the details of which are still not known, or easily accessible. The people of Sri Lanka will have to pay the price that citizens of the UAE, Qatar, Cyprus, Kuwait, Bahrain etc., are facing on the one side, and Lebanon on the other in allowing use of their sovereign territory to a foreign entity.

There was, therefore, some irony about the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi this week hosted by India and attended by Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister as they discussed strategic global issues. Neither India nor Sri Lanka could muster the courage to condemn an admitted military strike by America in one’s ‘backyard’, and the other’s ‘front lawn’.

In the midst of this expanding war, the longstanding call for the two-state solution for Palestine is buried under the rubble of all the destroyed concrete and spent munition, along with all the hope for peace in West Asia.

One is reminded of the oft-quoted words of the Marxist Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci who challenged dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascism – “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters“.