(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in Newsmax. Will Geopolitics Render Our Dollar Replaceable?)
For most of modern history, the machinery that moves money globally has been almost invisible. You bought something. Money moved. Banks settled it.
Nobody thought much about the financial architecture making it all possible.
That era is ending.
This writer saw this transformation taking shape years ago as co-founder and CEO of the American Blockchain PAC, where our mission centered on bringing regulatory clarity to America’s emerging digital-asset industry and helping policymakers grapple with a fundamental question: What, exactly, are these new assets, and how should the United States regulate them?
At the time, much of Washington treated digital assets as a regulatory problem.
Today, they increasingly look like a geopolitical one.
Payments are becoming geopolitics.
And the next great contest for global power may not be over which currency replaces the dollar, but over something far less glamorous and potentially just as consequential: who controls the rails on which the world’s money moves.
That distinction matters.
The U.S. dollar remains overwhelmingly dominant.
According to the Bank for International Settlements, roughly 98% of stablecoin value is still denominated in dollars.
The dollar remains deeply embedded in global finance.
But countries increasingly want the ability to move money without passing through infrastructure vulnerable to American or Western control. Russia offers perhaps the most provocative example of this.
In a recent interview, PSB Bank Chairman Petr Fradkov described payments as a tool of “new warfare,” arguing that the dollar’s power extends beyond the currency itself to America’s ability to influence transactions.
You don’t have to accept Moscow’s framing, or sympathize with its motives, to recognize the larger point. Money is power.
But the ability to determine how, where and whether money moves is power too.
Consider A7A5, the ruble-backed stablecoin launched in 2025.
It has reportedly already generated nearly $140 billion in cumulative turnover, making it the world’s largest non-dollar stablecoin.
Western governments have sanctioned entities associated with A7A5, and critics argue that the broader A7 network is explicitly designed to help Russia circumvent sanctions.
But that’s precisely why Washington should be paying attention.
Sanctions work because America doesn’t merely issue the world’s dominant currency.
It also sits at the center of much of the machinery that moves money around the world.
A dollar transaction between two foreign countries can still touch correspondent banks, clearing systems and regulated financial institutions within America’s reach.
That gives Washington something enormously valuable: the ability to see transactions, block them and, in some cases, effectively shut institutions out of the global financial system.
For decades, there were few practical ways around that architecture. Now there are.
China has expanded its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS, which provides infrastructure for renminbi transactions. Governments around the world are experimenting with central-bank digital currencies, tokenized deposits and stablecoins. Russia is pushing A7 internationally, including into Africa.
These systems don’t have to defeat the dollar to matter.
They merely have to make Western financial infrastructure optional.
That may be the geopolitical story Washington is missing.
The debate is usually framed around “de-dollarization”: Will China replace the dollar with the yuan? Will BRICS create a common currency? Will some new digital asset knock the greenback from its throne?
Those questions may be looking in the wrong direction.
The more immediate competition is over infrastructure, not currency. Imagine the dollar remains the world’s preferred store of value, but a growing percentage of international commerce can move across settlement networks Washington cannot easily monitor, interrupt or influence.
America could retain monetary dominance while gradually losing some of the geopolitical leverage that monetary dominance once automatically provided.
And that has consequences.
Alternative payment rails can reduce American visibility into international transactions.
They can make sanctions harder to enforce.
They can weaken the network effects that make U.S.-centered financial infrastructure indispensable.
But there is another irony here.
Dollar-backed stablecoins themselves currently strengthen the dollar because their value is pegged to it, extending the dollar’s reach into the digital economy.
Nearly the entire stablecoin market is dollar-denominated, and major issuers hold enormous quantities of U.S. Treasury securities.
Digital finance, at least so far, has exported the dollar rather than displaced it.
That gives Washington an extraordinary advantage, but not necessarily a permanent one.
Countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America increasingly want what might be called financial optionality: the ability to trade globally without depending exclusively on infrastructure controlled somewhere else.
For America, the answer isn’t to stop technological competition.
It’s to win it.
That means making dollar-based digital infrastructure faster, cheaper and easier to use.
It also means regulatory clarity for American stablecoins and tokenized finance and treating payment technology as strategic infrastructure rather than an obscure corner of financial regulation.
America spent decades building the world’s most powerful financial system. Its next challenge is ensuring the rest of the world still wants to use it.
Because the battle for the future of money may not ultimately be about whose face is printed on the currency. It may be about who owns the rails – and the terrain beneath them.
Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
