Trump’s war, Filipinos’ burden

Some wars begin with missiles, but they arrive here as higher pump prices, bigger electricity bills, canceled work contracts, and a phone call no family wants to receive from abroad. That is where this story stops being about Donald Trump, Israel, Iran, or the Strait of Hormuz in the abstract and starts becoming about Filipino households that had no say in any of it.

On Feb. 28, the United States and Israel launched airstrikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a string of senior officials. It was not a defensive action. It was a decapitation strike — a deliberate escalation that slammed the door on diplomacy even as talks were reportedly underway. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, put it bluntly: “We were talking with them when they decided to attack us.”

Three weeks later, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively shut. Oil hit USD 104 a barrel. And the people paying for it? Not Washington. Not Tel Aviv. It’s countries like the Philippines — which imports 98 percent of its crude oil from the Middle East and has 2.4 million citizens living across the Gulf.

The domestic damage is already brutal. Diesel prices are set to climb by as much as PHP 23.90 per liter this week. The Department of Energy is asking oil companies to “stagger” price hikes — as if breaking a PHP 23.90 per liter increase for diesel into three days makes the math any less devastating for a jeepney driver. It’s a psychological sedative for a terminal economic wound. With global oil hitting USD 104.00 a barrel and the Strait of Hormuz effectively a no-go zone, our energy security is being held hostage by a conflict we didn’t start and cannot stop.

But the real tragedy isn’t just the price of fuel; it’s the price of life. The death of Mary Anne Velazquez de Vera — a caregiver who died in Israel while reportedly helping her patient reach a bomb shelter — is a gut-punch that should end any debate about whether this is “our” war. She died performing an act of pure care in a landscape of pure aggression. She was valued enough to be entrusted with someone’s life, but not enough to be protected from someone else’s war.

Mary Anne is now the face of a terrifying reality: the OFW has become expendable global labor. We have 2.4 million Filipinos in the Middle East. While the government celebrates the repatriation of 1,315 people under the Bagong Pilipinas program, we have to ask about the 86,000 still documented in high-risk zones. Repatriation is a reaction, not a policy. Heroism, like Mary Anne’s, is a tragedy, not a strategy.

And whose war is this? Trump demanded that NATO allies and Asian nations send ships to reopen the strait. Japan said no. Australia said no. France and the UK — no. British minister Pat McFadden called it a “very transactional presidency,” which is diplomatic code for: nobody wants to clean up a mess they didn’t make. If wealthy, militarily capable nations are refusing to be drawn in, what does that mean for countries like ours, with no ships to send and no leverage to wield, but every peso of the fallout to absorb?

Trump’s promise that oil prices will “come tumbling down” once the war ends rings hollow when Iran has explicitly refused negotiations. There is no coalition behind this war and no off-ramp in sight.

So what can Manila do? The immediate moves — staggered hikes, emergency powers for electricity prices, scouting non-Middle Eastern crude suppliers — are necessary but reactive. The harder conversation is structural. The Philippines is one of the few countries in Asia with a fully deregulated oil market, which means global shocks hit Filipino consumers faster and harder than nearly anyone else in the region. ING has classified the country among the “worst impacted” in Asia. That’s not bad luck. That’s a policy choice decades in the making.

This crisis should force a reckoning: on energy diversification that does not just swap one import dependency for another, on a labor export model that places millions of Filipinos in volatile regions with no safety net beyond charter flights, and on a foreign policy that doesn’t mistake silence for neutrality.

The world shrugged when Trump returned. Now the world pays. But the bill, as always, falls heaviest on those who had no say in any of it.

This is no longer a distant war on a television screen. It is now a Filipino story, measured in remittances at risk, workers sent home, fares poised to rise, and families bracing for the next utility bill. America may call it strategy. Here, it looks more like another lesson in how the global South pays for decisions made elsewhere.