In an address to the Sri Lankan parliament, the country’s President Anura Kumara Dissanayake revealed that Washington and Tehran both came to Colombo with military requests on February 26 and both left empty handed. Dissanayake said that Sri Lanka had turned down both approaches within the same day, according to a report by BSS News.

The US request centred on Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, a large but chronically underused facility in the island's deep south. The US sought a four-day deployment window from March 4 to 8 for two warplanes repositioned from Djibouti, each carrying anti-ship missiles.

Colombo declined on the grounds that granting access would compromise the island's declared policy of non-involvement in the West Asia conflict. Iran's request arrived the same day. Three Iranian naval vessels returning from exercises with India's Navy had sought a Colombo harbour stopover between March 9 and 13.

Dissanayake told lawmakers that accepting Tehran's application would have made it politically untenable to refuse Washington, leaving rejection of both as the only consistent position. One of the three Iranian ships, IRIS Dena, never made it to any port.

A US Navy submarine sank the frigate off Sri Lanka's southern coast on March 4, 2026, killing at least 84 sailors before Sri Lanka's Navy recovered 32 survivors from the water. A separate vessel, IRIS Bushehr, was later admitted into Sri Lankan waters on humanitarian grounds, with its 219 crew members subsequently accommodated in Colombo.

The stakes of Sri Lanka's balancing act are tangible as Washington is the island's largest export market across all forms of goods and sectors while Tehran buys more Sri Lankan tea than any other country on the planet.