Lanka crisis shows that democracies won't swing into India or China camps

Sri Lanka has barely emerged from a decades-long civil war; it is not ready to become another front in an India-China cold war for control of the Indian Ocean

Most people in the island nation of Sri Lanka and its Asian neighbors were stunned last week when President Maithripala Sirisena dismissed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe -- and replaced him with Mahinda Rajapaksa, the populist strongman who had ruled Sri Lanka for a decade before the scrappy alliance between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe forced him out of power in 2015.

It was a shock not just because the move was almost certainly unconstitutional -- in Sri Lanka, a prime minister can only be dismissed if he or she loses a vote in Parliament -- but also because there was no indication that