The Philippines is seven thousand miles from Iran. It has no stake in the conflict, no seat at the negotiating table, no military presence in the theater. And yet on March 24, 2026, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed Executive Order No. 110, making the Philippines the first country in the world to formally declare an energy emergency as a direct consequence of the US-Iran war.
The reason is a single number: 98. That is the percentage of the Philippines’ oil that comes from the Middle East. When the Strait of Hormuz closed, it did not merely disrupt a supply chain. It severed a lifeline.
The Arithmetic of Dependency
The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply. Its closure sent shockwaves through every economy that depends on Middle Eastern crude, but few nations were as exposed as the Philippines. With 98% of its oil imports flowing through that single chokepoint, the country had effectively no buffer, no redundancy, and no margin for error.
The government has estimated that existing crude oil reserves will last until June 30 — barely three months. To bridge the gap, Marcos released 20 billion pesos (approximately $406 million) from the Malampaya gas fund, the country’s sovereign energy reserve, to secure emergency fuel supplies. The administration is simultaneously exploring alternative suppliers, including China, India, and Russia — partnerships that carry their own geopolitical complications and that, under normal circumstances, Manila might not pursue.
But these are not normal circumstances. When your country’s lights depend on a strait controlled by nations at war, normal is a luxury you cannot afford.
What It Looks Like on the Ground
The emergency is not an abstraction. Shopping malls across the Philippines have begun cutting operating hours to conserve energy. Rising fuel costs have pushed up prices for food and basic goods — a cascade that hits hardest in a country where millions already live at the margins. The connection between a closed strait and an empty market shelf is invisible until it is not, and for ordinary Filipinos, it is no longer invisible.
CNN described the broader regional trend as “Asia embraces energy austerity.” Foreign Policy was more direct: “Southeast Asia’s energy emergency begins.” The Philippines is the first to formally acknowledge what other nations in the region are experiencing in less visible ways — that a war in the Persian Gulf is a war on the living standards of everyone who depends on its oil.
The Deeper Question
What does it mean to be a casualty of a war you did not choose, in a region you do not border, over a conflict you had no power to prevent? The Philippines did not close the Strait of Hormuz. It did not impose sanctions on Iran. It did not launch the strikes that precipitated the closure. It simply had the misfortune of building an economy on the assumption that a waterway seven thousand miles away would remain open — an assumption shared by most of the developing world and rarely questioned by the international institutions that encouraged the dependency.
The search for alternative suppliers — China, India, Russia — is itself a commentary on how conflicts reshape alliances. Nations that the Philippines might have kept at arm’s length under different circumstances suddenly become essential partners when your reserves run out in ninety days. Dependency does not disappear when one source is cut off. It simply migrates to whoever can deliver next.
The First, Not the Last
The Philippines is the first nation to declare an energy emergency over the Iran war, but it will almost certainly not be the last. Across Southeast Asia, economies built on the same assumption — that Middle Eastern oil would flow uninterrupted — are confronting the same arithmetic. The Strait of Hormuz was never just a shipping lane. It was an invisible foundation beneath the daily life of billions of people who never had reason to think about it.
Now the malls are going dark. The food prices are climbing. And a country of 115 million people is rationing its future because two nations on the other side of the world could not resolve their differences without closing a waterway that the rest of the planet depends on.
The Philippines had no say in closing the Strait of Hormuz. It is paying the price anyway. That, perhaps more than any battlefield dispatch, is the truest measure of what this war costs.
