Hormuz, Marcos Jr., the United States, China and the Energy Fragility of the Asian Protectorate
“A country may have its own flag and still discover that its fuel depends on other people’s wars.”
The Philippines is an archipelago of more than seven thousand islands, more than 112 million inhabitants and an economy bordering on US$462 billion in GDP. It exports electronics, semiconductors, machinery, agricultural products, services and maritime labor. It also exports a political paradox that is hard to forget: its current president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., is the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, overthrown in 1986 after two decades of authoritarian rule.
Bad memory, some will say. Tropical democracy with selective amnesia, others will say.
But the Philippines is not only an uncomfortable family story. It is a strategic piece of the Indo-Pacific. It faces the South China Sea, lies near Taiwan, sits within the American containment arc and under China’s permanent gaze. Its geography makes it a natural aircraft carrier, a maritime corridor, an advanced frontier and a vulnerable country at the same time. There, sovereignty is not always written only in the Constitution.
It is also written in bases, military agreements, imported fuel and naval routes.
The Protectorate That Is Not Called a Protectorate
The United States and the Philippines have had a formal military alliance since 1951. In recent years, Washington expanded its access to Philippine facilities under the EDCA agreement, including strategic sites near Taiwan and the South China Sea. Legally, it is not a protectorate.
Geopolitically, it looks quite similar when the external military umbrella defines a central part of national security.
That point is decisive. If tension with China escalates, the Philippines could quickly become a military platform, a logistical rear base or a line of friction. Washington speaks of defense, freedom of navigation and international rules. Beijing speaks of sovereignty, military encirclement and provocation. Manila speaks of security.
The filipino people, meanwhile, pay for gasoline, rice, transportation and electricity.
Hormuz Comes in Through the Kitchen
The energy crisis revealed the real fragility. The Philippines imports almost all its crude oil from the Middle East, mainly from Saudi Arabia, and depends on passage through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most sensitive maritime chokepoints on the planet. Reuters reported that Iran assured Manila the safe passage of Philippine ships, including fuel cargoes, precisely because Philippine energy security depends on that route.
Hormuz lies far from Manila on the school map. But in the real economy, it sits inside the tank of every bus, every jeepney, every food truck and every ship that connects the islands. When conflict in the Middle East intensifies, the Philippines does not receive only news.
It receives inflation.
The Lions Around the Pump
The United States sees the Philippines as a key military ally against China. China sees the Philippines as an uncomfortable neighbor in the South China Sea, but also as a market, a trading partner and a piece on the Asian chessboard. Russia appears from the other end of the global energy equation: oil, gas, sanctions, war and fossil-fuel realignment.
None of the three experiences the crisis like a Filipino mother who must choose between transportation, food or cooking gas.
China is Washington’s great strategic rival in the area, but also Asia’s largest industrial actor. The United States protects routes, deploys agreements and sells security. Russia strains the global energy market through its war and its fossil-fuel weight. And the Philippines, trapped among those forces, discovers that its emerging economy can be hit by decisions made in Tehran, Washington, Beijing, Moscow or Riyadh.
Marcos Jr. and the Uncomfortable Memory
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. governs with a heavy surname. His father left behind a dictatorship, a disputed fortune, repression and a national memory still open. That the son now administers an energy crisis under the American military umbrella carries a fine, almost cruel irony. History does not always return as tragedy or farce.
Sometimes it returns as a fuel bill.
The question is not only whether the government will be able to contain prices, strikes or subsidies. The larger question is how much real autonomy a country has when its defense depends on Washington, its trade looks to China, its energy comes from the Middle East and its social stability can be broken by the international price of a barrel.
Hard Figures
The Philippines had a GDP of US$461.620 billion in 2024 and grew by 5.7%, according to the World Bank. Asia receives around 85% of the crude exported from the Gulf, and Asian imports fell 30% year on year in April after the near closure of Hormuz, according to Reuters.
Closing
When the sea fills with flags, radars and imperial pride, peace stops being water and begins to look like gunpowder.
“The Philippines knows it. Asia does too…”
Brief Bibliography
Reuters — Iran to allow safe passage of Philippine ships through Strait of Hormuz, 2026.
World Bank — Philippines Data, 2024.
Reuters — Asia battles rising, uneven toll of energy crisis caused by Iran war, 2026.
