Beyond Great Power Wars

Sri Lanka’s challenge now is navigating great power wars, AI, energy and digitization while safeguarding sovereignty 

• “When the tectonic plates of global politics are actively shifting, rigid certainty becomes a liability. For Sri Lanka to navigate the coming decades successfully, our leaders—especially our youth—must learn to sit comfortably with what can be described as a fertile confusion.”  
• “A handful of private tech corporations hold more power over what we think, how we vote, and who we trust than almost any elected parliament. They do not maintain standing armies, but they possess something far more potent: our data, our attention, and our cognitive pathways.”  
• “Artificial intelligence is entirely different because it is an agent rather than a tool. It is the first technology in human history capable of making autonomous decisions and hacking the primary operating system of human civilization, which is language.”

Navigating an increasingly volatile global landscape requires Sri Lanka to look beyond conventional great-power rivalries. As the rules-based international order fractures, the rise of transnational tech giants, autonomous artificial intelligence, and intense regional energy contests pose direct threats to national agency. To safeguard its sovereignty, Sri Lanka must abandon outdated diplomatic formulas and cultivate an empathetic, technologically fluent leadership—fusing youth digital literacy with institutional memory to turn geopolitical vulnerabilities into resilient strategic assets.  

The world is undergoing unprecedented and intense transformations. The implications of these changes will inevitably make society more volatile and unpredictable. In an era defined by rapid geopolitical restructuring, this essay aims to interrogate the question of what future strategic leadership must look like. Here, I argue that to gain a comprehensive picture of our changing world, we must look beyond conventional great-power rivalries to examine other critical factors, including artificial intelligence, energy shifts, technological statecraft, and the character of democracies. Only then can we appreciate the true complexity of the current global landscape.   

However, this is no easy task; it is one that naturally invites confusion. Our traditional educational and social institutions continue to train us to demand clear, neat conclusions, conditioning us to fear ambiguity.   

Yet, when the tectonic plates of global politics are actively shifting, rigid certainty becomes a liability. For Sri Lanka to navigate the coming decades successfully, our leaders—especially our youth—must learn to sit comfortably with what can be described as a fertile confusion. Embracing this uncertainty is not a sign of weakness; it is the vital first step toward intellectual humility, curiosity, and the adaptive thinking our nation desperately requires.   

The global environment is no longer a tidy landscape easily explained by old formulas, and anyone selling absolute certainty today is selling an illusion. To survive and thrive, Sri Lanka must radically redefine its approach to strategic leadership, centering its focus on the rising agency of smaller nations, the quiet revolution of artificial intelligence, and the twin pillars of national survival: energy and digitization.  

When headlines analyze changing world politics, they almost exclusively focus on high-profile superpower frictions, regional wars, and interstate crises. The reality is that the international system is fracturing under severe, interconnected pressures, from the grinding war in Ukraine to the devastating conflicts across the Middle East, culminating in direct military flashpoints like the US-Israeli confrontation against Iran.   

Yet, an exclusive focus on these massive conflicts breeds a myopic view that ignores a crucial development in modern global geometry: the unprecedented rising agency and dangerous positioning of Middle Powers and small island states. In a world where the old, predictable rules-based order is breaking down, smaller nations are no longer passive spectators to history; they are highly exposed arenas where these global flashpoints directly manifest.  

Geopolitical complexities for Sri Lanka

This exposure brings Sri Lanka face-to-face with brutal geopolitical complexities. Our island sits so close to the major Indian Ocean sea lanes that carry the lifeblood of global energy and container traffic. This critical geographic position makes Sri Lanka a hyper-sensitive focal point of strategic contestation, tightly squeezed between the competing security anxieties of India, the expanding maritime and economic footprint of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and the Indo-Pacific calculations of the United States.   

The volatility of this environment became starkly evident during the outbreak of the war involving Iran, when Sri Lanka was forced into a high-stakes diplomatic tightrope—facing simultaneous, competing pressure to grant southern airport access to US military aircraft while handling Iranian naval port-call requests in Colombo. This is not a landscape where a small nation can rely on passive, historical diplomatic formulas. Every foreign policy decision carries the immediate risk of alienating a vital regional neighbor or economic partner, threatening our maritime sovereignty, or turning our Exclusive Economic Zone into a direct theater for major power proxy rivalries.   

Emergence of a brand-new sovereign class – Transnational Tech Giants

Alongside traditional states, we are witnessing the emergence of a brand-new sovereign class in the form of Transnational Tech Giants. Historically, sovereignty belonged exclusively to the nation-state. Today, a handful of private tech corporations hold more power over what we think, how we vote, and who we trust than almost any elected parliament. They do not maintain standing armies, but they possess something far more potent: our data, our attention, and our cognitive pathways. When private algorithms dictate what billions of human beings perceive as reality, traditional national sovereignty begins to erode.  

This erosion is accelerated by the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Many mistakenly view this technology as merely a more efficient version of historical inventions like the printing press or the steam engine. But previous innovations were passive tools; an atomic bomb cannot decide to detonate itself, and a printing press cannot write its own book.   

Artificial intelligence is entirely different because it is an agent rather than a tool. It is the first technology in human history capable of making autonomous decisions and hacking the primary operating system of human civilization, which is language.

For a developing nation like Sri Lanka, recovering from economic shocks while being buffeted by intense regional competition, the danger is not a science-fiction war against robots. The true danger is a quiet, bureaucratic takeover. As global systems grow more complex, we risk rapidly delegating our decision-making to algorithms, allowing foreign networks to determine who qualifies for financial credit, what news our citizens consume, and how global resources are distributed. Because artificial intelligence is fundamentally blind to human suffering or democratic stability, outsourcing our cognitive labour means risking the loss of our very national agency.  

Energy and Digitization

Beyond traditional defence, the most immediate existential challenges for Sri Lanka lie in navigating its energy and digitization requirements - two sectors where high domestic demand directly collides with predatory global realities.   

As a small State with compromised sovereignty, Sri Lanka is caught in a brutal geopolitical race. While our immense wind and solar potential offer a pathway to becoming a regional energy hub, realizing this future requires a fiercely pro-Sri Lankan, justice-oriented approach to secure infrastructure investments without falling into asymmetric geopolitical traps.   

Concurrently, rapid digitization is a baseline necessity that determines whether Sri Lankan youth are marginalized as passive consumers or empowered as active creators in the global structure.   

Yet, as digital infrastructure and policies are introduced, digital sovereignty must be cruelly prioritized. Without this protective shield, Sri Lanka risks becoming geopolitically trapped in a sector vital to its survival, subverting the democratic will of the Sri Lankan people and leaving our youth vulnerable to external algorithmic systems they neither own nor comprehend.  

In this landscape, Sri Lanka cannot afford to play the outdated game of strategic leadership, where strategy simply meant cunning survival by playing big powers against one another for short-term financial injections.   

True strategic leadership requires active partnership and structural competence in the two deeply intertwined sectors of energy and digitization. Historically, concepts of leadership have been rigid, cold, and hyper-rational, prioritizing the mind over the heart and treating sensitivity as a weakness. That model is entirely obsolete. In a world dominated by cold, hyper-rational algorithms, the last thing we need is leaders who act like machines. The machines are already better at being machines than we will ever be. Instead, the strategic leadership we need must be anchored in our most human capacities, such as empathy, vulnerability, and deep listening.   

Ultimately, navigating this algorithmically driven world order requires a radical departure from the passive diplomatic frameworks of the past. Sri Lanka’s survival depends on an urgent, inter-generational partnership that fuses the institutional memory of the older generation with the digital fluency and adaptive energy of the youth.   

By converting geopolitical vulnerabilities into strategic assets—specifically through sovereign data protection, tech-fluent diplomacy, and tightly guarded renewable energy infrastructure—the nation can reclaim its agency. True strategic leadership for modern Sri Lanka lies in the courage to reject rigid, obsolete formulas, allowing a new generation of empathetic and technologically sophisticated leaders to steady the ship of state amidst the turbulent currents of global change.