President Trump is expected to close the deal on the Ukraine crisis, as he may wish to concentrate his full strength on two issues: ongoing operations in Venezuela and the bolstering of Japan’s military capabilities as tensions between China and Japan over Taiwan rise. Trump can easily concede Ukraine to Putin and refocus on the Asia–Pacific and Latin America. This week, he once again spilled the beans in an interview with Politico, one of the most significant conversations ever conducted with him. When asked which country currently holds the stronger negotiating position, Trump bluntly asserted that there could be no question: it is Russia. “It’s a much bigger country. It’s a war that should’ve never happened,” he said, followed by his usual rhetoric.

Meanwhile, US allies that fail to adequately fund defence and shirk contributions to collective security will face repercussions, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared at the 2025 Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. Hegseth singled out nations such as South Korea, Israel, Poland, and Germany as “model allies” for increasing their commitments, contrasting them with those perceived as “free riders”. The message was unmistakably Trumpian: partnerships are conditional, favourable only to countries that “help themselves” before asking anything of Washington.

It is in this context that it becomes essential to examine the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, issued last week, in order to consider how it differs from previous strategies and where it may intersect with current US military practice.

Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy is not merely another iteration of the familiar doctrine of American primacy; it is a radical reorientation of how the United States understands itself, its sphere of influence, and its role in the world. The document begins uncompromisingly: “The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of this strategy.” It is the bluntest opening in any American NSS since the document became a formal requirement in 1987. Whereas previous strategies—from Obama to Biden—wrapped security in the language of democracy promotion and multilateralism, Trump’s dispenses entirely with the pretence of universality. What matters are American interests, defined narrowly, almost corporately, as though the United States were a shareholder entity rather than a global hegemon.

It is here that the ghost of Senator William Fulbright quietly enters, warning in 1966 that “The arrogance of power… the belief that we are uniquely qualified to bring order to the world, is a dangerous illusion.” Fulbright’s admonition was directed at the hubris of Vietnam-era expansionism, yet it resonates with uncanny force in relation to Trump’s revived hemispheric ambitions. For despite Trump’s anti-globalist posture, his strategy asserts a unique American role in determining events across two oceans and within an entire hemisphere. The arrogance may simply be wearing a new mask.

Nowhere is this revisionist spirit more vivid than in the so-called “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”, perhaps the most controversial American hemispheric declaration since Theodore Roosevelt’s time. The 2025 NSS states without hesitation that “The United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Yet unlike Roosevelt, who justified intervention as a form of pre-emptive stabilisation, Trump wraps his corollary in the language of sovereignty and anti-globalism. The hemispheric message is not simply that outside powers must stay out; it is that the United States will decide what constitutes legitimate governance in the region and deny “non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities… in our Hemisphere”.

This wording alone has far-reaching implications for Venezuela, where US forces recently seized a sanctioned supertanker as part of an escalating confrontation with the Maduro government. Maduro, emboldened by support from Russia, Iran, and China’s so-called shadow fleet, frames Trump’s enforcement actions as piracy. But for Trump, this is precisely the point: a demonstration of restored hemispheric authority. In that sense, the 2025 NSS may be the first strategic document in decades to explicitly set the stage for sustained coercive operations in Latin America. The NSS promises “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere.” “Urgent threats” is vague, but in practical military planning, vagueness functions as a permission slip. It is not difficult to see how a state accused of “narco-terrorism” or “crimes against humanity” could be fitted into the category.

The return to hemispheric dominance is paired with a targeted shift in alliance politics. Trump makes it clear that the United States is finished subsidising alliances that do not directly strengthen American security. The NSS lays out the philosophy succinctly: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” This is a direct repudiation of the language found in Obama’s 2015 NSS, which emphasised that American leadership was indispensable to global stability. Trump rejects that premise outright. Leadership, in his framing, is merely leverage. Allies who fail to meet burden expectations will lose access, influence, and potentially even protection. Nowhere is this more evident than in the push for extraordinary defence spending among NATO allies: “President Trump has set a new global standard with the Hague Commitment… pledging NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defence.”

In turn, US disengagement from Europe becomes easier to justify. While Trump speaks of “negotiating an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine”, it requires little sophistication to decode this as a form of managed abandonment—an informal concession that Russia’s negotiating position is stronger, as Trump told Politico. Ukraine may well become a bargaining chip in the trade-off between strategic theatres: Europe shrinks, Asia and Latin America expand. The NSS’s emphasis on Japan, Taiwan, and China is markedly sharper than in 2017.

China looms over the 2025 NSS like an obsession, mentioned over twenty times, not merely as a competitor but as a driving force shaping American policy. Every discussion of technology, alliances, or regional security is filtered through Beijing’s shadow, as if US strategy exists solely to counter China. The strategy’s relentless focus risks turning global priorities into a theatre of paranoia, where the United States reacts constantly, defined less by its own interests than by fear of what China might do next.

It is equally striking that, just nine days after Cyclone Ditwah, the US Indo-Pacific Command deployed two C130 aircraft—capable of landing at only three locations in Sri Lanka, well away from the hardest-hit areas—and orchestrated a highly choreographed media performance, enlisting local outlets and social media influencers seemingly more concerned with flaunting American boots on the ground than delivering “urgent” humanitarian aid. History shows this is not unprecedented: US forces have repeatedly arrived under the banner of humanitarian assistance—Operation Restore Hope in Somalia (1992) later escalated into full security and combat operations; interventions in Haiti during the 1990s extended into long-term peacekeeping and training missions; and Operation United Assistance in Liberia (2014) built a lasting US operational presence beyond the Ebola response.

Trump’s NSS, meanwhile, states that deterring conflict in East Asia is a “priority”, and that the United States seeks to ensure that “US technology and US standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward.” Combined with heightened expectations of Japan, which is rapidly rearming, Trump’s strategic map shows a clear preference: if Europe cannot or will not defend itself, Asia might.

What makes the 2025 NSS uniquely combustible, however, is the combination of ideological framing and operational signalling. Trump explicitly links non-interventionism, long a theme of his political base, to the Founders’ moral worldview. He writes that “Rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible… yet this predisposition should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention.”

The Trump NSS is both a blueprint and a warning. It signals a United States abandoning the liberal internationalist project and embracing a transactional, hemispherically focussed, sovereignty-first model. It rewrites the Monroe Doctrine for an age of great-power contest, but in doing so resurrects the very logics of intervention that past presidents have regretted. And in the background, as Trump weighs the cost of Ukraine against the allure of a decisive posture in Asia and the Western Hemisphere, the world is left to wonder whether this new corollary is merely rhetorical theatre or the prelude to a new era of American coercive power. The ambiguity is deliberate, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.

[Correction: In my column last week, I incorrectly stated that India–Russia trade in FY 2024 25 was USD 18 billion; the correct figure is USD 68.7 billion, with a trade deficit of about USD 59 billion. Similarly, India recorded a goods trade surplus of around USD 41.18 billion with the US, not a deficit of USD 42 billion, with exports of USD 86.51 billion and imports of USD 45.33 billion. Total remittances to India in FY 2024 25 were roughly USD 135.46 billion, including USD 25–30 billion from the US. Apologies for the error.]

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa

selfmade businessman who became one of the richest men in the Central Province

I am happy that a book about the life and contribution of Sathkorale Muhamdiramlagedara Segu Abdul Cader Hajiar Mohamed Mohideen better known as Meezan Hadjiar or Meezan Mudalali of Matale [1911—1964] written by Mohammed Fuaji -a former Principal of Zahira College Matale, has now been published by a group of his admirers and relatives. It is a timely addition to the history of Matale district and the Kandyan region which is yet to be described fully as forming a part of the modern history of our country. Coincidentally this book also marks the centenary of Meezan Hadjiars beginning of employment in Matale town which began in 1925.

Matale which was an outlier in the Kandyan Kingdom came into prominence with the growth of plantations for coffee and, after the collapse of the coffee plantations due to the ‘coffee blight’ , for other tree crops . Coffee was followed by the introduction of tea by the early British investors who faced bankruptcy and ruin if they could not quickly find a substitute beverage for coffee.They turned to tea.

The rapid opening of tea plantations in the hill country demanded a large and hardworking labour force which could not be found domestically. This led to the indenturing of Tamil labour from South India on a large scale. These helpless workers were virtually kidnapped from their native villages in India through the Kangani system and they were compelled to migrate to our hill country by the British administration .

Meezan Hadjiar

The route of these indentured workers to the higher elevations of the hill country lay through Matale and the new plantation industry developed in that region thereby dragging it into a new commercial culture and a cash economy. New opportunities were opened up for internal migration particularly for the more adventurous members of the Muslim community who had played a significant role in the Kandyan kingdom particularly as traders,transporters,medical specialists and military advisors.

Diaries of British officials like John D’oyly also show that the Kandyan Muslims were interlocutors between the Kandyan King and British officials of the Low Country as they had to move about across boundaries as traders of scarce commodities like salt, medicines and consumer articles for the Kandyans and arecanuts, gems and spices for the British. Even today there are physical traces of the ‘’Battal’’or caravans of oxen which were used by the Muslims to transport the above mentioned commodities to and from the Kandyan villages to the Low country. Another important facet was that Kandyan Muslims were located in villages close to the entrances to the hill country attesting to their mobility unlike the Kandyan villagers.

Thus Akurana, Galagedera, Kadugannawa, Hataraliyadde and Mawanella which lay in the pathways to enter the inner territory of the Kings domain were populated by ‘Kandyan Muslims’ who had the ear of the King and his high officials. The’’ Ge’’ names and the honorifics given by the King were a testament to their integration with the Sinhala polity. Meezan Hadjiars’’ Ge ‘‘name of Sathkorale Mohandiramlage denotes the mobility of the family from Sathkorale, an outlier division in the Kandyan Kingdom, and Mohandiramlage attests to the higher status in the social hierarchy which probably indicated that his forebears were honoured servants of the king.

Meezan Hadjiar [SM Mohideen] was born and bred in Kurugoda which is a small village in Akurana in Kandy district. He belonged to the family of Abdul Cader who was a patriarch and a well known religious scholar. Cader’s children began their education in the village school but at the age of 12 young Mohideen left his native village to apprentice under a relative who had a business establishment in the heart of Matale town which was growing fast due to the economic boom. It must be stated here that this form of ‘learning the ropes’ as an apprentice’was a common path to business undertaken by many of the later Sri Lankan tycoons of the pre-independence era.

But he did not remain in that position for long .When his mentor failed in his business of trading in cocoa, cardamoms, cloves and arecanuts and wanted to close up his shop young Mohideen took over and eventually made a great success of it. His enterprise succeeded because he was able to earn the trust of both his buyers and sellers. He befriended Sinhalese and Tamil producers and the business he improved beyond measure took on the name of Meezan Estates Ltd [The scales] and Mohideen soon became famous as Meezan Mudalali – perhaps the most successful businessman of his time in Matale. He expanded his business interests to urban real estate as well as tea and rubber estates. Soon he owned over 3,000 acres of tea estates making him one of the richest men in the Central Province.

With his growing influence Meezan spent generously on charitable activities including funding a water scheme for his native village of Kurugoda also serving adjoining villages like Pangollamada located in Akurana. He also gave generously to Buddhist causes in Matale together with other emerging low country businessmen like Gunasena and John Mudalali.

Matale was well known as a town in which all communities lived in harmony and tended to help each other. As a generous public figure he became strong supporter of the UNP and a personal friend of its leaders like Dudley Senanayake and Sir John Kotelawela. UNP candidates for public office-both in the Municipality and Parliament were selected in consultation with Meezan who also bankrolled them during election time. He himself became a Municipal councillor. The Aluvihares of several generations had close links with him. it was Meezan who mentored ACS Hameed – a fellow villager from Kurugoda – and took him to the highest echelons of Sri Lankan politics as Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was a supporter and financier of the UNP through thick and thin.

Though his premature death at the age 53 in 1965 saved him from the worst political witch hunts under SWRD Bandaranaike who was his personal friend it was after 1970 and the Coalition regime that Meezan’s large family were deprived of their livelihood by the taking over of all their estates. Fortunately many of his children were well educated and could hold on till relief was given by President Premadasa despite the objections of their father’s erstwhile protégé ACS Hameed who surprisingly let them down badly.

It is only fitting that we, even a hundred years later, now commemorate a great self made Sri Lankan business magnate and generous contributor to all religious and social causes of his time. His name became synonymous with enterprise in Matale – a district in which I was privileged to serve as Government Agent in the late sixties.He was a model entrepreneur and his large family have also made outstanding contributions to this country which also attest to the late Meezan Hadjiars foresight and vision of a united and prosperous Srilanka.

by SARATH AMUNUGAMA.

by Uditha Devapriya

The following is the draft of a speech I delivered at Lakmahal Community Library on 27 November on Martin Wickramasinghe. The event was facilitated by the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust and was moderated by Hirun Matheesha. This is Part I of the lecture. Part II will follow next week.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for coming.

I want to begin with a quote.

“Reading books was his only way forward.”

It has a wider relevance to today’s presentation. I will return to it towards the end, and I will reveal who said it as well, but do bear it in mind until then.

I think Hirun Matheesha introduced me better than I ever could, though I suspect he was too kind and generous with the introduction. So, I will skip the ice-breaker.

Martin Wickramasinghe was easily Sri Lanka’s most well-known and prominent novelist and critic of the 20th century. In a career spanning 60 years – his first major work was published in 1914, his last in 1973 – he authored some 13 novels, a number of short story collections, and countless collections of essays on art, culture, history, literature, and politics. In terms of the themes he tackled in these works, he was a polymath. Though not an artist in the conventional sense of that word, he was a leading modernist in Sri Lanka and perhaps in South Asia, even if we often do not give him credit for this.

For obvious reasons, it is his fiction that has endeared him to the reading public in Sri Lanka. And why shouldn’t it? After all, there is hardly a student or a university undergraduate who has not heard of Madol Doowa, the Koggala Trilogy, or even Viragaya. These are seminal works in the context of Sri Lankan and Sinhala literature, and they have been translated to several languages, including Hindi, Russian, and Chinese.

By all accounts, Wickramasinghe was a voracious writer. He was also quite generous with his books. He had a tendency, which I suppose is intrinsic to all of us writers, to gift them to everyone and anyone he met and became friends with. If you read through his letters and correspondences – all carefully preserved at the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust – you will find that in every other letter someone writes to him, there is an acknowledgement of a gift of several books. It did not matter who it was: the US Ambassador in Colombo, the Warden of one of the leading schools in Sri Lanka, or the guard at a museum in Kent.

“It was very kind of you recently to send me the inscribed copies of two of your books, Aspects of Sinhalese Culture and Sinhala Language and Culture.”

Letter from Christopher Van Hollen to Martin Wickramasinghe

21 July 1975

“I am writing to thank you very much for the copy of your book which you have so kindly sent me… I have not yet had time to read it, but I am sure it will be interesting.”

Letter from R. S. de Saram to Martin Wickramasinghe

14 March 1950

“On returning to Ceylon, I sent the keeper of the Darwin Museum a copy of the fifth revised edition of my Sinhala book on Darwinism and evolution.”

Martin Wickramasinghe

“The Darwin Museum in Kent”, Revolution and Evolution

The fact that he could reach out to different kinds of people, from different backgrounds and stations in life, and use his books to connect with them at an intellectual level, shows how much of a networker he was in addition to being a thinker. This was true at almost all points in his life: long after he had become established, he was writing letter after correspondence to almost everyone he met. And he was gifting his books to all of them.

Born a decade before the turn of the 20th century, Martin Wickramasinghe quickly became the preeminent public intellectual and contrarian thinker of his time in Sri Lanka. He fused these two personalities within himself, and in doing so made a significant contribution as a thinker. I see this contribution as fundamentally being two-way. First, he wrote on a range of topics, in his home language Sinhala, which had not been accessible for local audiences. Second, he used his first-hand knowledge of his culture, applied the frameworks of foreign thinkers and scholars, and wrote extensively in English on his society.

In doing so, he redefined what it meant to be a public intellectual.

“A powerful shaper of public discourse, who made it clear that one cannot become a public intellectual without reaching the public.”
Nalaka Gunewardene

Interview with Uditha Devapriya, 12 March 2025z

To have written so much and made such a contribution, Wickramasinghe no doubt read a great deal before he began to put his thoughts down in pen and paper. To understand this and appreciate it, however, we need to be aware not so much of what he wrote as what he read, and more importantly, how he reflected on what he read.

The Martin Wickramasinghe Collection at the National Library in Colombo contains over 5,000 books. Most of them are worn out and dusty, although well preserved. Some are recent additions. The oldest among the collection date to the early 1910s. Straddling different periods, genres and subjects, they remain a useful guide to the man who owned them, read them, and wrote on the topics they covered.

Arguably the most interesting point about them are the annotations. Wickramasinghe was a voracious reader. Indeed, he called himself an “omnivorous reader.” He spent much of his income on books. He was indiscriminate yet critical in what he read. This comes out quite well in the annotations. Some of the older books have notes every few pages. The more recent ones hardly have them at all. This shows that Wickramasinghe was learning about these subjects for the first time and that he was reading as much as he could about them. As he read, he remembered. As he remembered, he annotated.

Most of these annotations are marginal comments. Some point to other sources. Many are critical, hardly any laudatory. On the side of one page in the 1934 edition of Caroline Rhys Davids’s Outline of Buddhism, to give one example, he argues the author seems:

“… ignorant of modern anthropology.”

In his copy of Maurice Baring’s An Outline of Russian Literature, published in 1914, he critiques the author’s characterisation of Leo Tolstoy.

For whatever reason, Baring was highly critical of Tolstoy.

“Tolstoy wrote about himself from the beginning of his career to the end”

To this Wickramasinghe responds:

“This observation is wrong. It is… altruism which impels Tolstoy to confess all the wrongs he has committed.”

Between Baring’s book and Rhys Davids’s there is a space of 20 years. During this period Wickramasinghe had matured and evolved. Beginning his life in Colombo as a bookkeeper to a shop owner, he went on to write articles to the Dinamina. In 1914 Wickramasinghe wrote his first novel, Leela. His preface to the first edition makes it clear how much of an influence the books he was reading had upon him. In no ambivalent terms, he notes the futility of drawing lines between Western and Eastern philosophy, science, between ways of looking at the world. The story itself unremittingly critiques tradition and order.

“There cannot be one shastra [system of knowledge and thought] for Asiatic people and another shastra for Western people.”

Martin Wickramasinghe, Leela

Such attitudes could only have been fostered through the books he was devouring. As he himself recounts in his memoirs Upan Da Sita he started reading rationalist and Western texts almost as soon as he shifted to Colombo in 1906.

Wickramasinghe’s granddaughter Ishani remembers his library very well.

“As a teenager I read D. H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, the Russians, from his collection. For him, reading was a window to the world.”

Ishani Sinnaduray

Interview with Uditha Devapriya, 20 March 2025

She also recalls he was insistent that his children and grandchildren read English and that they did not limit themselves to Sinhala or Sri Lankan literature.

“He regarded Sinhala literature highly. And he had a complicated relationship with Western culture. He critiqued it, yes, but he also recognised its value.”

Ishani Sinnaduray

Interview with Uditha Devapriya, 20 March 2025

It is not within the scope of this lecture to delve into these aspects of Wickramasinghe’s life, work, and thought. However, it is clear he could not have written what he wrote, without reading what he read. That is a convoluted way of putting it, but it is true.

To appreciate this, we need to realise and understand that his collection at the National Library is but a sizeable fraction of the total number of books and publications he acquired or read in his lifetime. Indeed, at one point in Upan Da Sita, he confesses that he no longer has a copy of a certain book or text with him. Yet the memory of what he read remained clear and sharp in his mind. What that indicates, more than anything else, is that he had no alternative to the books he read. Deprived of formal education at a fairly early stage in his life, books became a crucial part of his growing up. To appreciate this fact further, though, it is necessary to go back and revisit his childhood and teenage years.

Martin Wickramasinghe was born 135 years ago, on 29 May 1890, in the southern village of Koggala, some 22 km from Galle and 140 km from Colombo. Koggala stood at a midpoint between Galle and Matara, two of the leading coastal villages in British Ceylon. In his two memoirs, Ape Gama and Upan Da Sita, Wickramasinghe remembers vividly the world he was born to. A highly impressionable mind, he often wandered around his village, playing with children his age and exploring the natural surroundings. When he moved to a new school, Buono Vista College in Unawatuna, run by the Anglican Church, later, he spent his free time exploring the jungle beaches in Rumassala.

“Twice or thrice a week, after school was over, I went to the Rumassala forest… I was vaguely certain there were lions in Rumassala. I also felt there was something heroic in wandering around the jungle in Rumassala.”

Martin Wickramasinghe, Upan Da Sita

Translated by Malinda Seneviratne

In Koggala, Unawatuna, and Galle, he encountered many worlds and grew familiar with all of them. Though he was born to a rural and traditional setting, he found himself in the midst of Buddhist monks, Christian missionaries, and a culture which had fallen under the sway of European colonialism for over 300 years. It was during these formative years that he gained first-hand knowledge of the culture and environment of southern Sri Lankan. This was a highly transitionary period. The Galle Harbour, which had once commanded prestige, was slowly fading away, giving way to Colombo. It was against the backdrop of these transitions that he was forced to halt his studies and move to Colombo in 1906.

“I find it difficult to recapture and convey the rapturous reactions of a village boy on seeing Colombo for the first time. The Fort shops, the jetty, breakwater, and harbour alike captivated me. The great glass display window of a Fort shop, Tate’s Diamond Palace, bright with electric light, was one such sight that held me.”

Martin Wickramasinghe, Lay Bare the Roots

Translation of Ape Gama by Lakshmi de Silva

Martin Wickramasinghe had first visited Colombo when he was still studying at Buono Vista. Almost immediately he grew fascinated by the rhythms of life that animated the city. With his family he visited some of the more popular sites in the area, including the Museum. By the turn of the 20th century, these institutions had become symbols of a changing age, capturing a time when Sri Lanka was caught in the throes of colonialism yet was clamouring to discover its past. It was to this world that he shifted in in 1906.

Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst whose work spans a range of topics, including art, culture, history, geopolitics, and anthropology. At present he is working on a study of Martin Wickramasinghe. He can be reached at .present he is working on a study of Martin Wickramasinghe. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com..