The Global Beat by Gerald Lacuarta
Last Monday, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. looked at a map and said aloud what geography has been shouting for years: if war breaks out over Taiwan, the Philippines will be drawn in, kicking and screaming.
He was not being hawkish. He was stating a blunt fact. Taiwan sits just across a narrow strait from Batanes. Nearly 200,000 Filipino workers live and work there. One glance at any map shows the northern Philippines squarely in the splash zone.
For many Filipinos, especially the younger generation glued to TikTok and endless reels, this still feels like distant noise. Another geopolitical spectacle, Team America versus Team China, complete with memes, hot takes, and conspiracy threads. But Marcos’s warning deserves more than a scroll past. Look at what modern war actually looks like before you decide it cannot reach us.
In Ukraine, Russian drones have hit apartment buildings, power grids, and grain terminals hundreds of kilometers from the front lines. Civilian infrastructure became a weapon. In the US-Iran confrontation, Iran launched drone and missile strikes across multiple countries simultaneously, and the world’s most powerful military found itself playing whack-a-mole across the Middle East, unable to fully contain the spread.
War today does not stay where it starts. It bleeds across borders, disrupts shipping lanes, spikes oil prices, and arrives in ordinary lives long before any formal declaration. If that is what conflict looks like between a superpower and a mid-tier regional power, imagine what a war over Taiwan, fought between nuclear-armed giants with the world’s busiest trade routes in the crossfire, would unleash.
This is not Iran or Ukraine or Gaza, conflicts we watched safely from our living rooms. A Taiwan war lands in our backyard. It slams our wallets, disrupts our jobs, and could transform familiar places like Clark from economic hubs into something far more consequential.
The damage would not be measured only in missiles and headlines. It would be measured in empty fuel stations, soaring prices at the palengke, lost remittances, stalled factories. Taiwan dominates the global semiconductor industry, producing the majority of the world’s advanced chips, the components inside our phones, laptops, cars, and medical devices. A serious disruption, even a blockade, could trigger cascading shortages worldwide.
For the Philippines, already woven into regional electronics supply chains, that means halted assembly lines, factory layoffs, and higher costs for everything imported. Fuel prices would spike as shipping lanes come under threat. Insurance premiums would skyrocket, inflation would bite at every level, and remittances from those 200,000 OFWs in Taiwan could dry up overnight if evacuation becomes necessary. That is not abstract economics. For millions of Filipino families, it is the difference between filling your motorcycle tank and choosing between rice and the electricity bill.
Yet how many of us are genuinely preparing for that possibility?
This is where the generational gap becomes glaring. Older Filipinos still carry the living memory of World War II, the occupation, the battles, the cost of conflict on our own soil. But today, look at the ongoing US-Iranian conflict. Many in the younger generation, raised in relative peace and constant connectivity, treat geopolitics as content.
Scroll through social media and you find people cheering for one superpower or another as if international conflict were a basketball rivalry. Some echo American narratives without question. Others repeat Iranian propaganda without pause. Meanwhile, misinformation spreads faster than facts, and the Filipinos who would suffer most, workers, small businesses, families already stretched thin, get lost in the noise. Complacency is dangerous. Geography does not care about our algorithms or our desire for peace.
Nowhere is this reality more tangible than in Central Luzon. Clark International Airport and the surrounding economic zone have thrived as a logistics and business hub. Subic Bay offers world-class port facilities. Under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, these areas are already seeing increased strategic relevance. In a Taiwan contingency, Clark and Subic could shift rapidly from commercial gateways to critical nodes, staging points for logistics, humanitarian evacuations, or temporary refugee processing.
Kapampangans and other Central Luzon residents might suddenly find global geopolitics passing, literally, through their neighborhoods. The economic benefits these zones have provided could come with new risks: heightened security, potential targeting through cyberattacks and disinformation, pressure on local infrastructure. Strategic geography cuts both ways.
President Marcos has reiterated the Philippines’ commitment to the One China policy and our deep desire to avoid war. No sane nation wants conflict. But fear is not a foreign policy, and neither is denial. Preparedness means building economic buffers against supply shocks, investing in contingency plans for OFWs, and educating the public, especially the young, on real risks rather than letting misinformation fill the void.
The Philippines does not seek war. But Taiwan is not a distant headline. It is our neighbor, our economic lifeline, and if the worst comes, our emergency. War does not wait for us to be ready. It does not announce itself politely. And it does not care whether we were paying attention.
