Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he spoke with China’s top diplomat on Wednesday about a state visit scheduled for September by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, to Washington, where President Trump intends to try to bolster what he sees as a personal friendship the two men are developing.

The fact that the two nations’ top diplomats spent much of a meeting in Manila talking about the visit is the strongest sign yet that the summit is on schedule, despite remarks last week from Mr. Trump blaming China for trying to interfere in American elections.

“It’s just to create the groundwork for another positive visit,” Mr. Rubio said of his talk with Wang Yi after it ended in the evening after more than an hour. “I think President Xi will have a very positive visit when he comes to Washington.”

He said that the two governments were putting in place a board of trade and a separate board of investment, and that more details would be announced during the September summit. The two leaders agreed to establish the groups when Mr. Trump visited Beijing in May, more than half a year after he had to retreat from a trade war he had started with China.

Mr. Rubio told reporters traveling with him that he and Mr. Wang did not talk about Mr. Trump’s recent accusations that China had tried to interfere in U.S. elections, mainly in 2020. The intelligence material that Mr. Trump brought up in a speech last Thursday was not new and had been reviewed by U.S. officials years ago. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia is the main rival that has tried to interfere in American elections.

The Chinese foreign ministry has given pro forma statements pushing back on Mr. Trump’s accusations. But it has also indicated that it understands that the American president made his speech for the purposes of domestic politics rather than for voicing actual foreign policy concerns.

“Obviously, there are areas of great differences,” Mr. Rubio said of U.S.-China relations. “Both sides will acknowledge that we’ll have to work through those, and I think these differences will exist for the foreseeable future.”

Mr. Rubio was in Manila for an annual conference of top diplomats from Southeast Asian nations.

Mr. Wang and Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, are also in Manila this week.

Mr. Rubio accompanied Mr. Trump on his visit to Beijing in May, where Mr. Xi showered the American president with flattery — even saying he supported the “Make America Great Again” movement — and hosted a state banquet. A video showed Mr. Rubio marveling at the ceiling of a meeting room in the Great Hall of the People, next to Tiananmen Square. During his 14 years as a senator representing Florida, Mr. Rubio became one of the leading China hawks in Congress, but he has since tempered his tone to stay in alignment with Mr. Trump.

Asked whether China and Russia were giving information to Iran to help the Iranian military fire projectiles at U.S. troops, as some U.S. officials have told reporters was happening, Mr. Rubio did not give a direct answer.

“Nothing that’s happened, nothing that China has done, has in any way changed the trajectory of what you’re seeing in terms of the conflicts we’re having with Iran,” he said.

Mr. Rubio said China is unhappy with Iran’s attacks on commercial tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for the transport of oil and gas to China and many other countries.

Mr. Rubio did criticize recent aggressive encroachments by Chinese coast guard ships into waters near Taiwan. In recent years, China has increased its naval and aerial military operations around Taiwan, a de facto independent island that Mr. Xi has said must eventually be brought under the control of the Chinese government.

Mr. Rubio said the activity of Chinese ships “comes up in every one of our meetings because we obviously disagree with those actions, and we actually think that they run contrary to the spirit of what we’re trying to work out with them with regards to strategic stability.”

Mr. Rubio said the United States would honor treaty commitments made to allies such as the Philippines, whose navy regularly has hostile encounters with Chinese vessels.

“It speaks to areas of disagreement when it comes to our policies with China,” he said. “Those need to be managed very carefully because, obviously, a conflict, be it economic or otherwise, between the U.S. and China would have a dramatic global impact.”

Mr. Rubio also said the United States would like to eventually have detailed discussions about nuclear issues with China, given the country’s rapidly growing arsenal.

Rodela Romero was attending an event at her church in northern Manila when her phone rang. It was a local reporter asking her to comment on what was being described to her as a nightmare scenario.

Ms. Romero, who oversees the oil industry at the Philippine Department of Energy, had been following news of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran that day in late February. Now, the reporter told Ms. Romero, the Strait of Hormuz — the vital maritime choke point through which the Philippines imports enormous amounts of crude oil — had been shut.

“We import almost 100 percent of our petroleum products,” said Ms. Romero, 64. “We’re so vulnerable,” she recalled thinking at the time.

In the ensuing weeks, government officials scrambled to secure supply from alternative producers, at great cost. Gasoline prices doubled and diesel prices tripled, triggering transit strikes in Manila and a sudden spike in inflation that experts warned could push more than a million Filipinos into poverty.

On March 24, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. declared a national energy emergency. The Philippines was the first country to take such a step, highlighting the view that, outside the Middle East, the economic effects of the U.S.-Iran war are primarily a crisis for Asia.

Developing nations across Asia have been hit hard by the monthslong throttling of energy flows because of their deep reliance on Middle Eastern oil and gas. As clashes between the United States and Iran ramp up again, and shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf nears a halt, regional capitals in Asia are assessing how to prepare for a future of protracted instability.

The Philippines is leading what is expected to be a wave of developing nations seeking to build strategic petroleum reserves — stockpiles of crude oil that can be tapped during disruptions. Japan is offering financing and technical expertise, and officials in Tokyo say they are holding similar talks with Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Japan’s involvement is part of an effort to bolster its regional energy security, according to Taro Han, a former official at Japan’s trade ministry, who recently joined The Asia Group, a consulting firm. Even with its own substantial stockpiles, Japan remains deeply dependent on Southeast Asian supply chains for goods made with oil byproducts, including medical supplies.

Just as the 1970s oil shocks transformed the global energy architecture — spurring 16 of the world’s largest economies to establish the International Energy Agency, which requires member states to hold a 90-day cushion of net oil imports — a similar structural shift is underway today.

The question is whether, as electrification and renewable energy proliferate, it is the right time for a wave of fast-growing, energy-hungry countries to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to amass fossil-fuel reserves.

Over the past five decades, the maintenance and periodic deployment of these reserves have helped stabilize global supply and prices. In March, the I.E.A. set off the largest coordinated release in its history to help steady oil markets after the outbreak of fighting in the Middle East.

Yet the release had a muted impact on economies in Asia that are heavily dependent on Persian Gulf imports but don’t have national strategic reserves. In the Philippines, the first and most dramatic effects were felt by drivers who faced soaring fuel costs.

“The impact on drivers’ incomes has been huge,” said Mody Floranda, the national president of Piston, a labor coalition representing drivers of jeepneys — the flamboyant, chrome-plated utility vehicles that zigzag along the streets of Manila. Jeepney drivers charge a base fare of about 13 pesos, or 21 U.S. cents, to ferry passengers who hop onto the open backs of their vehicles.

Mr. Floranda, 60, was speaking from the group’s headquarters in Manila, a wood-paneled room littered with megaphones, cardboard sardine boxes and protest signs calling for economic relief and an end to “the U.S. war of aggression.”

He said that the daily wage needed to support a family of five in the Philippines was estimated to be around 1,200 pesos, or $20, but given the current fuel prices, a driver who works 12 to 18 hours a day takes home only about 400 to 600 pesos. “This is obviously not enough,” he said.

In April, Piston filed a petition to raise fares by 10 pesos per ride to reflect higher diesel prices. The group is awaiting official government approval. “Ten pesos does not affect income that much,” Mr. Floranda said. “It’s merely to survive the high price of oil.”

The Philippine Institute for Development Studies, a state-run think tank, warned in a report in April that crude prices of around $105 a barrel could push more than 1.3 million Filipinos into poverty. Global oil prices rose above that level in the early stages of the war, and though they have recently traded lower, at around $90 a barrel, an uptick in fighting has incited renewed volatility.

While the acute-phase supply panic appears to have subsided, the economic damage is lingering as higher fuel costs bleed through the economy, inflating the price of everything, including food. “The impacts on poverty, welfare and growth are still unfolding,” said Adoracion Navarro, a senior research fellow at P.I.D.S.

The Asian Development Bank expects rising commodity costs to drag down growth. In a report released this month, the bank lowered its growth forecast for developing economies in Asia and the Pacific to 4.9 percent in 2026, a slowdown from 5.5 percent growth in 2025.

Recent A.D.B. board meetings have been dominated by discussion about how best to support the Philippines and other developing Asian countries particularly vulnerable to oil-supply disruptions. Officials have debated whether to help countries build emergency stockpiles or accelerate the transition away from oil.

Strategic petroleum stockpiles are expensive and time-consuming undertakings. Building a 90-day reserve is expected to cost nearly half a billion dollars for the Philippines. Crude oil also has a shelf life in storage, meaning that costs are ongoing.

Albert Park, the A.D.B.’s Manila-based chief economist, said he was cautious about recommending support for stockpiling oil.

“If you have an option to just scale up renewable energy and reduce dependence, that’s another way to build resilience,” he said. “Not to say you shouldn’t do it, but you’d better have a clearheaded understanding of the costs and benefits of that strategy because it’s expensive.”

Mr. Han, the former Japanese trade ministry official, said that Tokyo was advocating reserves that meet the I.E.A. benchmark of 90 days’ worth of demand. “We need a more long-term, comprehensive approach in order to strengthen our energy security in the region,” he said. Helping Asia build up reserves “is at the very core of our diplomacy at this particular moment,” he said.

At the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, Ms. Navarro thinks the answer is to build a modest level of strategic reserves, while also pushing for investments in energy efficiency, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and Manila’s skeletal rail networks.

“A 90-day reserve is a lot of money,” she said. “It’s I.E.A. levels, and we’re not yet an economically advanced country.”

The legislature in Manila is still conducting hearings on how to codify a strategic petroleum reserve policy into law. The Department of Energy is also looking into how to encourage the construction of more refineries, so that the Philippines will have the capacity to turn crude reserves into refined products like gasoline and diesel, according to Ms. Romero, the department official.

That was another vulnerability exposed recently, when China halted exports of refined petroleum products in March. It was a big blow to the Philippines, which relies on China’s diesel supplies.

In her office, tucked away in the back of a sun-bleached compound in Manila, Ms. Romero recounted when she received the news of China cutting off exports via another call from a local reporter.

That time she wasn’t at church. “Otherwise, I would have just prayed,” she said. “Prayed for a miracle.”