ON March 24, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed Executive Order 110 and placed the country under a state of national energy emergency. Diesel had gone past P130 a liter, stations were rationing, and the Department of Energy was authorized to move against hoarding and profiteering. A country that imports 98 percent of its crude from the Middle East had its fiscal year rewritten by a war fought 4,000 nautical miles away by governments that never asked it for anything.
The Philippine Institute for Development Studies put numbers to that in April. At crude around $105, 1.34 million Filipinos fall below the poverty line; at $145, up to 3.1 million, with Bicol, Mimaropa, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and much of Mindanao taking the sharpest hit. Brent settled at $97.13 a barrel on Sept. 8, a six-week high after a weekly gain of roughly 8 percent. Whether a household in Sorsogon eats three meals is now being decided in a waterway Manila does not control.
The second exposure is people. By his fifth State of the Nation Address in July, Marcos counted more than 12,000 workers pulled out of the war zone and over 140,000 given food, medical care or cash. The Philippines is still the world’s largest supplier of seafarers, with 203,179 certified officers. Filipinos are not spectators to the shipping war in the Gulf; they are crewing it. Cash remittances hit a record $35.63 billion in 2025, 7.3 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), and have been sliding since the strait closed.
Manila’s answer was bilateral. On April 2, Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro secured from her Iranian counterpart a commitment that Tehran would allow safe and unhindered passage through Hormuz for Philippine-flagged vessels, energy cargoes and all Filipino seafarers. Competent work, and it held on the narrow question of supply. It did nothing to prices, because an exemption is not a settlement. The country stays a price taker in a market repriced by other people’s decisions.
The governments that went further did so outside any Western framework. On March 31, China and Pakistan issued a five-point initiative: immediate ceasefire, no strikes on power and desalination plants, the strait reopened, disputes back inside the UN Charter. Iran accepted a truce eight days later. Shahbaz Sharif ran the political track while Asim Munir shuttled to Tehran, and in mid-June, Islamabad produced a 14-point memorandum that Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian both signed: toll-free commercial transit for 60 days, the naval blockade lifted within 30, at least $300 billion for reconstruction. It expired on Aug. 17, wrecked by clauses drafted loosely enough that each side could read its own position into them. It failed. It is also the only text either belligerent has ever put a signature to. Washington produced none of its own. Brussels produced none at all.
Beijing’s part deserves plainer accounting than it usually gets here. China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil and is at the same time a major customer of the Gulf states Iran has been shelling, so it loses money at both ends of this war. Wang Yi made 26 calls to regional counterparts before the April truce. Trump told Agence France-Presse that it was China that convinced Tehran to negotiate — an American claim, not a Chinese one. Beijing itself has neither confirmed nor denied the role, which is its habit in this file. On the narrow question of stopping the shooting, it has done more than any capital that lectures Manila about alignment.
None of that asks Manila to move on any other file. Every other file stays where it is and gets argued where it belongs. Hormuz is a supply question, and a supply question is settled with the governments that move the cargo. The alternative, waiting on a settlement drafted in Washington, has been tested for six months and has yielded a lapsed memorandum, a blockade that has pushed commodity transits through the strait down to about 10 ships a day, and a Houthi barrage on Sept. 7 that set off fires at Saudi Aramco’s Jazan refinery, 400,000 barrels a day of capacity, and wounded 73 people. Filipino households are billed for every one of those weeks.
Brics opens at Bharat Mandapam on Sept. 12. Iran sits as a full member. So do the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, on the other side of the same war. China and Russia are there; Indonesia is there as the sole Southeast Asian member. The Philippines is not. Neither is Pakistan, which brokered the only agreement anyone signed — an absence that describes the bloc more accurately than its communiqué will.
Three things on that table would reach Filipino households. First, the strait. Mohsen Rezaei has announced a transit corridor agreed with Oman, entry and exit points under Iranian control, which Tehran says it will lodge with the International Maritime Organization. A corridor blessed by Iran, the Gulf members and China in one room, with no attribution of blame in it, is worth more to a Filipino crew than another round of naval escorts. Second, the $300-billion reconstruction clause, dead with the memorandum and revivable as a bloc pledge at no new cost to India. Third, payment interoperability, which reads as a seminar topic until it is priced as fees on 7.3 percent of GDP.
Manila is not in that room. It is not without an instrument either. The Philippines holds the Asean chairmanship, convened the July ministerials where Southeast Asian governments registered their serious concern about the war’s effect on shipping and energy, and floated an oil-sharing mechanism, and hosted the meeting on July 24, where Asean and China agreed to build out energy cooperation. Indonesia will be in Delhi. A chairman that has spent six months absorbing this war’s costs can hand its neighbor three specific asks to carry into a room where Tehran, Abu Dhabi, Beijing and Delhi are all seated. That is a smaller ambition than a foreign policy. It is a larger one than another phone call.
