Modern Economic Warfare

After Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, the dollar lost its commodity anchor. What replaced it — the mechanism that sustained dollar dominance in the absence of gold convertibility — was an arrangement negotiated between Henry Kissinger and Saudi Arabia in 1974. The agreement was never…

The petrodollar system is not a formal agreement or a published policy — it is a structural feature of the global monetary system created by the combination of oil pricing conventions and US military relationships. Understanding how it works mechanically helps explain both the extraordinary…

SWIFT — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — is a Belgian cooperative that provides the messaging infrastructure for international bank-to-bank payments. It is not a bank, not a government agency, and nominally not a US institution. Yet it has become one of the most…

In February and March 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Australia froze approximately $300 billion in Russian central bank assets held in Western financial institutions. This was not a seizure — technically, the…

The US dollar's share of global foreign exchange reserves has fallen from approximately 72% in 2000 to approximately 59% in 2023 — a decline of 13 percentage points over two decades. This decline is real, gradual, and historically significant. It is also frequently misread: a reduction in reserve…

Whether the US dollar will remain the world's dominant reserve currency over the next 20–50 years is one of the most genuinely contested questions in international economics. Two serious analysts — Barry Eichengreen and Lyn Alden — represent the range of informed opinion, and their disagreement is…