It’s been a year since Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected president of Sri Lanka. His electoral victory broke the seven-decade duopoly of Sri Lanka’s two main parties, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) – the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna or SLPP was but a splinter group of the SLFP. Dissanayake did not leave the IMF program his predecessor negotiated; he kept Sri Lanka within those guardrails to protect macroeconomic stability and ongoing debt negotiations. The second missed opportunity came this year with Sri Lanka’s no-show at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit at Tianjin, China. If the government wants to signal that Sri Lanka will be a rule-abiding, strategically autonomous actor, showing up in person at such platforms is essential.