By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

“Why is it in America’s interest to arm and fund Israel to draw America into an unnecessary war?” — Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch

On a busy street in Colombo, the signs of a distant war rarely announce themselves directly. There are no sirens, no air raids, no missile trails overhead. But the effects arrive anyway, often invisibly at first, then all at once: a rise in fuel costs, a jump in transport fares, dearer food, tighter household budgets and that familiar, sinking feeling that another external shock is about to squeeze a country already stretched thin. That is how wars work for small economies like Sri Lanka. They are not always fought on local soil, but they are often paid for there. Yes! Sri Lanka didn’t vote for this war. But its people are fighting it daily—at fuel pumps, market stalls and empty plates.

The latest illegal war on Iran, which the United States and Israel waged, is the case in point. While the military confrontation unfolds thousands of miles away, its economic shockwaves are already being felt across import-dependent countries in Asia, including Sri Lanka. The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints, has become a source of anxiety for global markets. Oil prices respond instantly to tension there, and when oil moves, everything else follows: freight, insurance, food imports, electricity bills and, eventually, the cost of everyday life. Sri Lanka, still recovering from its own economic collapse, has little room to absorb that kind of pressure.

A fragile recovery under strain

The country’s vulnerability is not new. Sri Lanka imports most of its fuel and relies heavily on foreign exchange to keep essential goods moving. It remains tied to global shipping routes for medicine, industrial inputs, fertilizer, machinery and food. That means any major disruption in oil markets or maritime trade does not remain an abstract geopolitical event for long. It becomes a domestic cost-of-living crisis.

This is especially dangerous now, because Sri Lanka’s recovery remains fragile. The 2022 economic breakdown exposed how weak the country’s buffers had become. Since then, the government has been trying to stabilise the economy under tight fiscal conditions, IMF oversight and public frustration over austerity. Another external shock — especially one involving energy — lands not on a resilient system, but on one still trying to mend itself.

That is why the war on Iran matters so much to Sri Lankans, even if most will never hear a single shot fired. When crude prices rise, the impact moves quickly through the economy. Fuel becomes more expensive to import. Transport costs rise. Food prices follow. Businesses face higher operating expenses. Households cut back. Inflation returns in a familiar and punishing form. For a country already managing debt, currency pressure and uneven growth, the margin for error is dangerously small.

The unseen route of pain

In moments like these, the geography of war matters less than the geography of dependence. Sri Lanka is dependent on imported fuel, imported fertilizer, imported goods and imported stability. That is what makes it so exposed when the Gulf is threatened. The Strait of Hormuz is not just a line on a map; it is a global artery. When that artery is under stress, the cost of moving goods rises everywhere.

The consequences can be traced across the island in ordinary ways. A bus fare hikes up,  because diesel is more expensive. A shopkeeper raises prices because transport costs have risen. A family spends more on rice, lentils and cooking gas because global markets are tightening. The shock is spread thinly across millions of transactions, which is precisely why it can be so destructive. It does not arrive as a single catastrophe. It arrives as a hundred small ones. Sri Lanka has seen this pattern before. External price shocks have repeatedly destabilised household budgets and worsened inflationary pressure. But this time the country is more vulnerable than usual because it has fewer reserves, weaker growth and a public still recovering from the trauma of scarcity. The political implications are obvious. Economic pain quickly becomes social anger.

Who pays for escalation?

There is a brutal injustice at the heart of all this. The people who decide to escalate conflict are rarely the ones who absorb the consequences. The United States and Israel choses to justify military action in terms of security, deterrence or regional dominance although in fact it is a war for oil and regional dominance , but Sri Lankan families, by contrast, cannot afford such language. They experience the war as a line item in the household ledger.

That is the hidden structure of modern power. Great powers act; smaller states pay. The military decisions of the strong are translated into economic hardship for the weak. A strike on Iran can become a spike in freight charges. A threat to shipping can become inflation in Colombo. A regional war can become a skipped meal in a working-class home. This is not simply a matter of unfortunate spillover. It is the way the system works. In a globalised economy, wars are never fully contained. They move through markets, supply chains and currencies. The countries with the least influence over military strategy are often the ones with the greatest exposure to its fallout.

UN paralysis, small-state rage

The UN watches impotently. Secretary-General’s pleas for Charter compliance echo hollowly; the Security Council, veto-hobbled by US power, can’t touch Washington or Tel Aviv. Sri Lanka’s National Students’ Congress condemns the “unprovoked Israeli-US war,” but Colombo’s voice—middle-power at best—drowns in the din.

This is the Global South’s fury: rules bind the weak, exempt the strong. Nuremberg-style accountability? A fantasy without ICC jurisdiction over superpowers. Yet the moral case burns: if Iraq’s invasion warranted trials, why not aggression causing global economic carnage? Sri Lanka, no military player, pays via IMF loans strained by war volatility. The United Nations has offered the expected warnings. The Secretary-General has reminded states that force must be compatible with the UN Charter and that escalation undermines international peace and security. But the gap between statement and power remains immense.

The UN can condemn. It cannot compel. And in a world where major powers are central to the conflict, that weakness becomes painfully visible. Smaller countries are left with rules that sound firm and institutions that sound responsible, but little actual protection when the powerful decide to act. For Sri Lanka, this matters because the country cannot independently shape the conflict’s outcome, yet it must still carry the cost of the outcome. That is what makes the current international order so frustrating for small states: the system speaks the language of law while operating on the logic of hierarchy. Rules are strict for those without power and negotiable for those with it.

Sri Lanka’s quiet exposure to the Gulf

There is another reason the war matters so deeply to Sri Lanka: the country is tied to the Gulf not only through oil, but through labour and remittances. Tens of thousands of Sri Lankans work in the Middle East, and the money they send home supports families, local businesses and foreign-exchange inflows. Any broader regional instability can affect that flow, whether through employment insecurity, payment delays or a weaker regional economy.

So when the Gulf shakes, Sri Lanka feels the tremor in more than one way. The energy shock arrives through fuel imports. The labour shock arrives through remittances. The trade shock arrives through shipping and insurance. Together, they create a slow squeeze on the economy. Sri Lanka exemplifies small states’ plight: hyper-connected yet powerless. Diversify oil sources? India, Russia help, but Hormuz rules. Build reserves? Austerity bites. Hedge? No billionaire buffers here. This is why the war on Iran is not a distant moral argument for Sri Lanka. It is a practical threat to recovery, prices and livelihoods. It is one more reminder that small states are deeply vulnerable to the ambitions of large ones.

The myth of controlled war

Supporters of military pressure often speak as though escalation can be managed precisely. They imagine “limited strikes,” “measured responses” and “controlled deterrence.” History suggests otherwise. Once shipping lanes are threatened and energy markets respond, the effects spread far beyond the original target.

Iran does not need to win a conventional war against the US or Israel to make the conflict costly. It only needs to make the war expensive enough to hurt everyone else. That is why the Strait of Hormuz matters so much. Even the threat of disruption is enough to send markets into motion, and markets do not care about strategic talking points. They care about risk. For countries like Sri Lanka, that risk translates into harder choices at the fuel pump, the supermarket and the treasury.

A small-country warning

Sri Lanka cannot pretend that this is somebody else’s problem. It is not. The country may not be able to stop the war, but it can name what the war is doing to it. It can join other vulnerable economies in demanding restraint and respect for international law. It can plan more seriously for imported inflation. It can protect the poorest households from the worst effects of rising prices. And it can refuse the idea that wars of the powerful are somehow unavoidable facts of life. That matters because silence is how the costs of empire become normalised. When the pain of distant wars is treated as routine, the burden on small states becomes invisible. But the burden is real, and it is growing.

Closing: the bill always arrives

There is a final truth that small countries understand better than great powers do: wars do not end where they begin. They travel. They spread. They become budgets, prices, shortages and broken plans. For Sri Lanka, the war on Iran is already becoming part of daily life, even if most of the island never sees the battlefield. The powerful may speak of security and strategy. But in Colombo, Kurunegala, Jaffna, Galle and Batticaloa, people will remember the war in more ordinary terms: the cost of petrol, the price of rice, the strain on remittances, the feeling that life has become a little harder again.

That is the real violence of faraway wars. They are sold as acts of strength, but they are paid for by the weak. And unless the world learns to restrain the militarism of the powerful, Sri Lanka and countries like it will keep receiving the same message in different forms: you did not choose the war, but you will still pay for it. This is war’s true face for Sri Lanka: not geopolitics, but grocery lists. The powerful wage it; the powerless pay it. Unless the world reins in unchecked US adventurism and Israeli impunity—via reformed UN, empowered South or sheer market backlash—the Hormuz chokehold will keep squeezing Colombo’s throat. And, the Global South cannot and won’t stay silent forever!