The French geopolitical expert Renaud Girard has stated that the weaponization of the dollar has backfired on the United States.
Over the past decades, countries worldwide have become more willing to reject dollar transactions in their foreign trade settlements. Russia has shifted to foreign exchange in national currencies with China and Eurasian Economic Union members. Additionally, Saudi Arabia clinched a deal with China to sell oil for yuan in December 2022.
French geopolitical expert Renaud Girard has warned of this incoming de-dollarization, caused by none other than the US itself. The expert said that Washington had overused the greenback as an instrument of political pressure, and nowadays more and more countries are starting to flee from the US-made global financial system. The alternative is to set up a bilateral foreign exchange in national currencies. Some states like Russia and China have gone even further and made their own payment systems.
“By turning their currency into an instrument of political pressure on other nations, the US has unwittingly launched a worldwide movement to overthrow the ‘king-dollar’. Total de-dollarization will not happen overnight, but it is clearly an irreversible tendency,” Renaud Girard told Le Figaro.
The expert cited the example of using the dollar as an instrument of suppression by referring to the French bank BNP Paribas. In 2014, the US Department of Justice sentenced the financial institution of an independent nation to a $9-billion monetary penalty for trade deals with Iran, Sudan and Cuba – countries that have been under US economic sanctions for decades. By doing so, the US authorities demonstrated that they didn’t want others to trade with these countries using the dollar.
According to the Brazilian government, China and Brazil have reached a deal to trade in their own currencies and ditch the US dollar.
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