No relying on U.S.-Iran peace talks

The Philippines did not start the war in the Middle East. It did not choose to source 90 percent of its oil from a region where peace, apparently, is something that neither side can tolerate for very long.

The US and Iran had signed a Memorandum of Understanding. They had just started the initial round of talks when — BOOM — Iran, piqued at a vessel that had skirted the Strait of Hormuz, unleashed a drone attack on it. The Americans fired back. Donald Trump returns to Truth Social to threaten, once again, to erase Iran from the face of the earth.

And so the cycle grinds on: a deal within reach, then a provocation, followed by a counter-punch, and a social media tirade from the most powerful man on the planet. How, precisely, is durable peace supposed to emerge from this theater of mutually assured belligerence — where Iran cannot keep still long enough for the ink to dry on an agreement, and the American president cannot resist the visceral satisfaction of threatening annihilation between rounds of golf?

Honestly? It probably won’t. Not soon. The entrenched interests on all sides — military, ideological, and political — make a genuine resolution before year’s end a fantasy. And the Philippines would be foolish to wait for sanity to prevail in a region it cannot influence, between actors who seem incapable of leaving their pistols in their holsters. What it can do is stop hedging and act.

The most urgent move is energy transition — and the pace so far has been excruciatingly slow. The government has fast-tracked 13 renewable energy projects through its “green lane” system, and that is the bare minimum, not a cause for applause.

The Philippines sits on extraordinary geothermal, solar, and wind resources that remain underutilized. Every month of delay in bringing these projects online is a month of continued vulnerability to oil price shocks manufactured halfway around the world by people who will never feel the consequences at a Philippine fuel pump.

The Maharlika Investment Corp.’s planned petroleum storage initiative addresses buffer capacity — but storage is a painkiller, not a cure. The cure is generation: domestic, renewable, and relentless.

Beyond energy, the country must stop squandering the advantages it actually holds. Its market openness, competitive labor costs, and a young, English-fluent workforce outperform nearly every Southeast Asian peer on the metrics that matter to manufacturers and supply chain managers.

Electronics, auto parts, food manufacturing — these are sectors where the Philippines can compete and win. But investors demand predictability, and predictability demands governance. And that is precisely where the country keeps bleeding.

Which brings us to a provocative argument going around: that the Philippines might be better served spending less energy prosecuting the corrupt and more time improving the lives of ordinary Filipinos.

The logic has surface appeal. Corruption thrives where poverty is endemic, where public servants are underpaid and where citizens are too economically precarious to demand accountability. Fix the conditions, the argument goes and you starve the corruption of its oxygen.

There is something to this — but taken too far, it becomes a convenient excuse for impunity. Poverty reduction without accountability is a leaky bucket.

Last year’s public works scandal — ghost projects, phantom flood control, state officials and contractors enriching themselves while communities drowned — is not an abstraction. It is direct evidence that governance failure is itself a cause of poverty, not merely its companion.

The better way, we imagine, is not sequencing but simultaneity. Prosecute corruption swiftly and visibly while channeling equal energy into education, public health, and infrastructure that actually gets built. The two are not in competition. They are the same fight.

What the Philippines cannot afford is its oldest bad habit: treating chronic dysfunction as a permanent condition, dressing up incrementalism as strategy, and mistaking survival for progress.

The global supply chain window is now open. Other countries are moving. The businesses that arrive first will build the relationships, the facilities, and the institutional familiarity that latecomers will spend years trying to replicate.

The Philippines has the fundamentals. What it has always lacked is the institutional will to close the gap between potential and performance. That gap is not destiny. But closing it will require more than green lanes and good intentions.