The Middle East Crisis and What It Costs the Philippines

On the evening of February 28, 2026, the war arrived. It arrived as a headline on a phone screen, a spike in a commodity index, and then, hours later, a notification that someone's daughter had died in Israel. Mary Ann B. De Vera, a thirty-two-year-old caregiver from Pangasinan, was struck by shrapnel while helping her elderly patient reach a bomb shelter. She was the first confirmed Filipino fatality of a war that the Philippines had no part in starting and no capacity to stop. She was doing what millions of her countrymen and women do every day: sustaining this archipelago from the outside because the archipelago cannot yet sustain enough of them from within.

The conflict — a military escalation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran that ignited in the closing days of February 2026 — is thousands of kilometers from Manila. But distance, in a country that has made the export of its own people the cornerstone of its economic structure, is a luxury we do not have. When George Francis Miranda, a forty-six-year-old sailor from somewhere in these islands, went missing after his tugboat was struck by missiles in the Strait of Hormuz while responding to a distress call, the Philippines lost a node in the vast, invisible infrastructure of survival that connects  a quarter of the world's commercial fleet to the families waiting for wire transfers in Bulacan, in Cebu, in Cagayan de Oro, in a thousand barangays that have built their entire economic reality around the monthly arrival of foreign currency and the quarterly return of someone they love.

This essay is about what the war has revealed — with the unsparing clarity that only a genuine crisis provides — about the structure of the Philippine economy, the fragility of its development model, and the specific human cost of a national policy that, across five decades and a dozen administrations, has never satisfactorily answered the question of how to make staying home a dignified economic choice for the ordinary Filipino.

Let us begin with the numbers, because the numbers tell the first part of the story with a precision that prose can only approximate. There are approximately 2.4 million Filipinos in the Middle East, according to data from the Department of Foreign Affairs. Of the ten most popular overseas destinations for Filipino workers in 2025, four were Middle Eastern countries. Saudi Arabia ranked first. The United Arab Emirates ranked second. Qatar and Kuwait placed fourth and fifth. More than fifty percent of deployed overseas workers are concentrated in this single region — the region that, as of the time of writing, is engulfed in one of the most serious geopolitical crises since the second Gulf War.

In 2025, overseas Filipino workers in the Middle East sent home $6.48 billion in cash remittances — roughly eighteen percent of the country's total remittance receipts, which stood at $36.634 billion for the year. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas has noted that OFW remittances comprised 7.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2024, falling to 7.3 percent in 2025 — a twenty-five-year low, nearly identical to the level recorded in 2000, even as the absolute peso amounts have grown. This is the financial mathematics of our dependence: a corridor of human labor connecting the Gulf states to Philippine households so wide and so load-bearing that when that corridor is threatened, the entire macroeconomic structure of the country trembles.

Dr. Alicor Panao of the University of the Philippines has described developments in the Gulf as 'a high-stakes economic event for the Philippines, where foreign policy shocks translate into household vulnerability and macroeconomic uncertainty.' When a war breaks out near the Strait of Hormuz — through which one-fifth of the world's oil supply passes — the Philippine government discovers, with each passing week, that it has built its national survival on a foundation whose geological stability it never fully tested.

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway, roughly fifty-four kilometers wide at its most constricted point, running between Iran and Oman. It is the single most important chokepoint in the global energy system. In normal times, approximately twenty percent of the world's traded oil and a significant portion of its liquefied natural gas pass through this strait every day. When the strait closes — when Iranian strikes, mines, and effective blockades reduce traffic through the waterway to a trickle — it closes for the Philippines, which imports roughly ninety-eight percent of its crude oil from the Middle East.

The effects cascaded almost immediately. Within the first week of the conflict's escalation, the Department of Energy was warning of diesel prices projected to rise to eighty pesos per liter, with further spikes to ninety if the conflict dragged on. Gasoline was expected to reach sixty-four pesos per liter, with additional increases looming. By mid-March, economic analysts were projecting gasoline prices of up to P91.60 per liter and diesel at P114.90 — numbers that would have seemed fantastical in the energy price reports of 2024. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. declared a state of national energy emergency, invoking emergency powers that allowed the government to manage fuel distribution and prioritize imports, but which, as the think tank Capital Economics noted in a March 26 report, 'won't prevent an economic shock.'

The government's response, in the immediate term, included a mandatory four-day workweek for executive offices, a 'twenty-four-degree rule' for public sector air conditioning, and legislative moves to grant the President emergency powers to suspend fuel excise taxes. Senator Sherwin Gatchalian called on the Marcos administration to open high-level diplomatic talks with Iran to secure safe passage for Philippine-bound oil tankers — a remarkable diplomatic request. The Philippines imports nearly all of its crude oil from the very region that is actively at war.  It has no refining capacity sufficient to buffer extended supply disruptions. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro put it plainly in an interview in Paris: 'It is of vital importance to us that the Strait of Hormuz be opened immediately and kept safe for the poor Filipinos who need to pay astronomical prices for electricity, fuel, and power.'

This is the part of the story that macroeconomic frameworks tend to obscure in the abstraction of aggregate indicators. A position paper released on March 26, 2026 by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) made the distributive reality explicit: the ongoing oil shock is a disproportionate burden on the poor. Senior research fellow Adoracion Navarro wrote that the poorest households, with their high food expenditure shares and limited income flexibility, bear the brunt of second-round inflation effects — the price increases in transportation, basic goods, and electricity that flow downstream from every peso added to the cost of a liter of fuel. A jeepney driver in Caloocan does not have a hedge fund. A market vendor in Divisoria does not have a fuel surcharge. They have the market as it is, which is increasingly the market as the war has made it.

And then there are the seafarers. This is a story the world does not tell loudly enough, because the world's shipping industry has arranged itself around the assumption that a quarter of its global workforce will be Filipino, will be experienced, will be available, and will absorb whatever conditions the market presents to them with the particular Filipino capacity for endurance that other nations mistake for contentment.

More than 6,000 Filipino seafarers were working in or near the conflict zone and surrounding areas as of mid-March 2026 — many of them waiting at anchor in the Persian Gulf for a window of safety through the Strait of Hormuz that was not yet opening. A series of Iranian strikes had effectively closed the strait, leaving nearly 2,000 vessels stranded near the gateway for petroleum exports from the Gulf. Judy Domingo, president of the 50,000-strong United Filipino Seafarers union, said she had received hundreds of calls from concerned sailors bottled up in the strait, with food supplies an immediate concern. 'There are also members expressing their desire to leave the ship,' Domingo said. 'But of course, we cannot get them out of there immediately.'

John Winston Isidro, a thirty-two-year-old sailor aboard a Very Large Crude Carrier, described a life aboard that had become, since the blockade began, a compound of monotony and precaution: the crew had stopped working above deck, a double watch had been installed on the bridge, and off-hours were spent scrolling Facebook and playing computer games. Another seafarer, posting online under the name Choi, described a vote in which the crew was consulted on whether to risk passage through the strait. His captain had gathered them in the conference room. 'Our captain asked us who wanted to pass through,' Choi said in a video verified by AFP Fact Check. They are scenes of ordinary people attempting to make rational decisions inside a situation that rational decision-making was not designed to handle.

By April 1, 2026, the International Transport Workers' Federation reported that food and water provisions were running low for seafarers stuck near the closed strait, with crews rationing supplies. 'We have been receiving text messages from seafarers saying we're running low on provisions, we're running low on fuel, we're running low on water, we're running low on food,' said ITF Maritime Coordinator Jacqueline Smith. The Department of Migrant Workers had already classified the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Gulf of Oman as Warlike Operations Areas, entitling Filipino seafarers to refuse boarding vessels headed for the strait and to claim increased compensation if they were already deployed there when hostilities escalated. George Francis Miranda, the tugboat sailor responding to a distress call, remained missing. His wife and young daughter were waiting.

The economic forecasters had, by late March 2026, assembled a reasonably coherent picture of the damage, assuming the conflict continued through the year. Capital Economics cut its Philippine GDP growth forecast for 2026 to 3.8 percent from 4.5 percent — a significant revision downward from an economy that had already underperformed in 2025, growing at only 4.4 percent, itself a post-pandemic low driven by weakened infrastructure investment and declining investor confidence amid the flood control corruption scandal. The think tank noted that outside the Gulf Cooperation Council countries at the direct center of the war, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka would be 'hit hardest' — all heavily dependent on imported Middle Eastern energy with limited fiscal space to cushion the shock.

MUFG Research estimated that every ten-dollar increase in oil prices per barrel cuts Philippine GDP growth by approximately 0.2 percentage points and raises inflation by approximately 0.6 percentage points — and cautioned that these historical sensitivities likely underestimated the actual macro impact, because the transmission mechanisms in this crisis involved not just price effects but potential energy shortages, significant indirect sectoral spillovers, and non-linear effects as oil prices breached key thresholds. DLSU economists Jesus Felipe and colleagues warned in their March 2026 report that oil prices might reach $140 per barrel — 'a level that would drastically alter the inflation outlook and amplify the growth constraints' — and cautioned that the combination of slower growth and higher inflation could create the conditions for stagflation: simultaneously the most difficult and the most politically corrosive macroeconomic environment a government can face.

The Philippine peso, meanwhile, crossed the sixty-peso-per-dollar level on March 19, closing at what was then a new historic low of P60.10 against the greenback. Capital Economics forecast the peso ending 2026 at sixty to the dollar. Economists at the University of Asia and the Pacific projected first-quarter GDP growth of approximately three percent — the same pace as the dismal fourth quarter of 2025 — with inflation rising to 4.2 percent year-on-year in March, nearly double the February rate. The Asian Development Bank, in a report released March 26, warned that the conflict could lower economic growth in developing Asia and the Pacific by up to 1.3 percentage points over 2026 and 2027, and raise inflation by 3.2 percentage points, if energy market disruptions lasted more than a year.

None of these numbers exist in isolation. Behind each decimal point in a GDP forecast is a Filipino family that will pay more for rice because the farmer who grew the rice paid more for fertilizer because fertilizer prices rose nearly twenty percent in early March as global urea markets responded to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Behind each basis point of inflation is a tricycle driver who will pass the fuel surcharge to a passenger who will pass the cost to a market stall that will pass it to a household already running close.

It is worth asking why. There is enough blame in Philippine history to distribute generously across colonizers, creditors, oligarchs, and technocrats — but in the analytical sense. Why, in 2026, does the Philippines still occupy this particular position in the global economy: a net exporter of labor to regions it cannot control, a net importer of energy from regions now at war, with no industrial base broad enough to buffer external shocks and no domestic employment market dignified enough to provide an alternative to departure?

Filipinos are, by any measure available, among the most educated, most adaptable, most relentlessly capable workers in any country where they are found. The global shipping industry depends on them. The nursing systems of the United Kingdom, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and a dozen other nations depend on them. The domestic work that sustains middle-class households from Hong Kong to Riyadh to Rome is done, in very large proportion, by them. It is the labor profile of a people whose economy was not built to employ them at home.

Vietnam, which in 1986 had a per capita income lower than the Philippines, is now the world's second-largest exporter of electronics and posted confirmed GDP growth of 8 percent in 2025. Indonesia, an energy exporter, is expected to hold up better against the shock than the Philippines — supported by subsidy programs and the fact that it sells the commodity that the Philippines buys.

The structural adjustment programs imposed on the Philippines beginning in the early 1980s required reductions in state expenditure, liberalization of the economy, and the opening of markets to foreign competition in ways that systematically undermined the development of domestic industry. Unlike South Korea and Taiwan, which used state intervention, industrial policy, and targeted protectionism to build domestic industries capable of competing globally, the Philippines followed the Washington Consensus with a fidelity that its neighbors did not share and that its creditors did not themselves practice. The result is an economy that exports educated Filipinos and imports fuel, and that is therefore uniquely exposed whenever the global geopolitical order fails — which is to say, with increasing frequency.

There is a particular cruelty in the specific geography of this crisis. The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao — already in the fragile stages of recovery from a convergence of climate disasters that included Typhoon Tino in November 2025, Super Typhoon Uwan, and Typhoon Basyang in February 2026, which brought hundred-year rainfall to Northern Mindanao and caused P1.48 billion in economic losses to Surigao del Sur alone — is home to over 250,000 Bangsamoro OFWs currently in the Middle East, many of them in high-alert zones. The Office of the Chief Minister of the BARMM and the Ministry of Labor have activated emergency protocols to provide logistical and financial lifelines to families who have lost contact with relatives in volatile areas. But the resources available to the BARMM government for emergency response are not proportionate to the scale of the crisis it is managing, and the families waiting for calls that are not coming are waiting in communities already weakened by disasters that arrived before anyone had finished counting the cost of the previous one.

This is what it means to live at the convergence of multiple structural vulnerabilities. Climate change and geopolitical instability compound each other, exploiting the same underlying fragilities — inadequate state capacity, insufficient fiscal space, overdependence on sectors subject to external disruption — and they do so disproportionately in the places that are already least equipped to absorb them. Mindanao and the Bangsamoro region have been made, by history and policy alike, into the Philippines within the Philippines: a region with distinctive cultural, ecological, and economic resources that has been, across generations, systematically underinvested and then blamed for the consequences of that underinvestment.

The government's response has been, in the humanitarian dimension, genuine and energetic. President Marcos moved quickly to establish hotlines for Filipinos in the Gulf, deployed quick response teams from embassies and consulates across the region, arranged charter flights as soon as airspace permitted, and coordinated with the Armed Forces of the Philippines — particularly the Philippine Air Force and Navy — for possible rescue and repatriation operations. The DFA's acting undersecretary assured the Senate that 'as long as this crisis continues, we will not rest until everyone who wishes to come home is safe and safely home.' The apparatus of departure that the Philippines has built over fifty years — the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, the Department of Migrant Workers, the diplomatic infrastructure of embassies in every Gulf state — is, in moments of crisis, also an apparatus of retrieval.

But retrieval is not the same as prevention. And the systemic questions raised by the crisis — why the Philippines was this exposed, what structural changes might reduce its exposure, how a nation with this much human capital might build an economy that generates dignified employment at home are questions that crisis management, however competent, does not answer. What answers them — or what begins to answer them — is the kind of long-term, honest, politically difficult reckoning with the structure of the Philippine economy that the current crisis has, at minimum, made harder to avoid. The PIDS position paper calling for a 'distributional policy response' is a beginning. The DLSU economists' warning that 'monetary policy alone is insufficient to restore economic confidence' and that stronger fiscal policy and credible public investment are required is a beginning. The Senate hearing at which lawmakers examined the convergence of energy dependence, OFW vulnerability, and structural fiscal weakness — the specific combination that makes the Philippines, in Capital Economics' phrase, among the countries hardest hit outside the war zone itself — is a beginning.

Mary Ann De Vera was thirty-two years old. She was a caregiver from Pangasinan. She was in Israel because the Philippines did not generate enough caregiving jobs that paid a caregiving wage, and Israel did, and the differential between the two was a number so large and so obvious that no amount of patriotism or rhetoric or ceremonial Bagong Bayani recognition could make it disappear. She was one of the 2.4 million Filipinos in the Middle East, and she was, in the dry language of disaster management, a casualty of a conflict in which she had no stake and no say and no protection beyond the hotline her government had set up and the embassy staff working around the clock in Tel Aviv.

George Francis Miranda was forty-six years old. He was a sailor responding to a distress call — which is, in maritime culture, a fundamental ethical one, the ancient covenant of those who work the sea. His tugboat was struck by missiles. His wife and daughter are still waiting. The United Filipino Seafarers union president has received hundreds of calls from sailors bottled up in the strait, rationing food, watching the water, playing computer games while the geopolitics of powers larger than themselves arrange themselves around the question of whether the lane through which a fifth of the world's oil travels will remain open.

They are the specific human cost of a development model that has never been fully reckoned with, and a crisis that has made the reckoning newly urgent. The Philippines is, technically, in charge of this archipelago. It has elections and a constitution and universities full of brilliant people and a diaspora full of politically educated, globally experienced citizens who understand from the inside how the world works and what it extracts from those who are positioned as it has positioned us. The question that the Middle East crisis has posed, with an urgency that routine policy discourse rarely generates, is whether that understanding can be organized into a politics — a genuine industrial policy, a serious investment in domestic employment, an honest conversation about what kind of country we are trying to build — or whether it will dissipate, as previous crises have dissipated, into the warm, comfortable language of Filipino resilience.

Resilience is a virtue. People can be resilient and also, simultaneously, be governed by structures that make their resilience perpetually necessary. The families of Mary Ann De Vera and George Francis Miranda are resilient. The 6,000 Filipino sailors rationing food in the Persian Gulf are resilient. The 2.4 million Filipinos in the Middle East who have, as of this writing, not been repatriated because the airports are closed and the conflict is ongoing and the situation remains, in the President's words, 'very fluid' — they are resilient. The question is whether we will, finally, be angry enough and organized enough and politically serious enough to build a country that does not require us to survive it in the first place.