SRI LANKA, THE US AND WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

The US has been grappling with the problem of how to advance its interests in the world, and throughout much of the 20th century the question boiled down to the debate between the realists and the idealists.

Since the late 1970s, and particularly since the collapse of Communism, it seemed that the latter had won: liberal interventionism, which emphasized cooperation, had triumphed over hard realism, which emphasized competition. It would be wrong to distinguish these two from each other so starkly, not least because the proponents of one approach aren’t necessarily opposed to what those of the other have to say, but all the same, US foreign policy has revolved around this division.

There are some scholars, commentators, and analysts here who argue that a Joe Biden presidency won’t be that different from a Donald Trump one, at least as far as Sri Lanka and South Asia are concerned. This argument is made mostly by those on the Left.

The Sinhala nationalist line, on the other hand, is that there is a difference: a section of it prefers Trump as President, claiming that under him the US didn’t go to war, fewer drones were despatched, and the monopoly of financiers in the system was broken. None of this is true. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, on the other hand, are liberal interventionists beholden to campaign finance and lobbying, and so a Biden-Harris ticket is bad news for the country and region, if not the world. At the same time yet another section of the nationalist crowd, leaning to the Left, believes there’s no difference.