No safe passage

No safe passage | Daily Tribune

That should alarm any Filipino who has filled a gas tank or paid an electric bill this year. The Philippines imports somewhere between 90 and 98 percent of its crude from the Gulf. Oil accounts for roughly 30 percent of the country’s primary source of energy, virtually all of it shipped in, and the transport sector runs on almost nothing else.

When the strait first seized up in March, the country did not need an economist to explain the consequences. Fuel prices nearly tripled. Vessel traffic through Hormuz collapsed from some 90 ships a day to a handful. Crude briefly hit $115 a barrel.

President Marcos declared the country’s first-ever national energy emergency, and government estimates put as many as 3.1 million more Filipinos at risk of falling into poverty. Add the roughly 2.5 million Filipino workers in the Gulf sending home an estimated $15 billion a year, and the exposure runs through household budgets and family remittances at once — and now, grimly, through Filipino lives at sea.

Two Filipino seafarers aboard the Saudi-flagged tanker Sidr were killed late Monday when the vessel was struck while transiting the strait, Saudi shipping firm Bahri confirmed this week. This is not an abstraction for policymakers to model; it is a body count.

Manila’s one real hedge has been diplomatic, not structural: a safe-passage arrangement with Tehran for Philippine-bound vessels.

It is worth something — it reduces the odds of an outright cutoff — but it does nothing to shield Filipino consumers from the global price spike driven by insurance premiums and rerouted shipping the moment the strait gets contested again. A ship that is technically allowed through still sails into a market that has already repriced the risk.

Three paths lie ahead, and policymakers should be planning for all three rather than betting on the mildest. The most likely, at least for now, is more of the same: intermittent strikes and counterstrikes, elevated but not catastrophic fuel prices, periodic shocks tied to specific incidents rather than a full shutdown.

The more dangerous scenario is a genuine re-closure of the strait — a return to mine laying and vessel seizures at the scale of March and April — which would test Manila’s safe-passage deal directly and, if it fails, send the country back to counting down a reserve buffer that officials once measured in weeks.

The most consequential scenario is a wider war: strikes that draw in Qatar’s Al Udeid base, Bahrain’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, and Gulf states themselves, which would push oil past its earlier peak and layer an OFW-safety crisis on top of an energy one.

There is one real check on Washington’s appetite for further escalation, and it is worth remembering before assuming the worst.

Trump halted the July bombing campaign after the US military confirmed that months of intense operations against Iran since February had severely depleted US stockpiles of high-end interceptors and precision-guided munitions. Beyond that, polling also showed that Americans oppose this war by more than two to one heading into November’s midterms.

That argues against a deliberate push toward closing the strait outright, even as the underlying pattern of contained escalation grinds on. It is that pattern — not any single headline-grabbing strike — that should be driving Philippine energy policy right now.