Joe Sullivan, a former advisor on the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration, and now a senior advisor at the Lindsey Group, published an article in Foreign Policy on Nov. 2 which is a clear-eyed review of the West’s self-inflicted destruction of the value of the dollar, along with an appraisal of what the expanded BRICS grouping of 11 nations (or BRICS+) are positioning themselves to do about that—all written from the standpoint of someone hostile to the BRICS’s policies.
Sullivan begins by warning his readers that today is a “world much riper for de-dollarization now than it was even six months ago.… Twentieth-century oil embargoes may seem passé, even puny, relative to the 21st-century trade and financial actions that BRICS+ could theoretically now manage.”
He recounts the various potential pressure points: the Suez Canal through which 12% of world trade flows, is now surrounded by new BRICS members Egypt, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E. and Ethiopia; their huge holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds ("Saudi Arabia owns more than $100 billion in U.S. government bonds. BRICS+ countries now own more than $1 trillion in Uncle Sam’s bonds"); domination of world oil markets (Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Iran and Russia); and “the metals and rare earths that the energy transition will depend on” (Brazil, China and Russia).
