Empires do not "fall" in a day.
They run out of consent, then credit, then cover stories.
In the 1960s De Gaulle began calling the bluff.
Paris asked for its gold back and sailed it home.
Vietnam turned the money printer into policy.
In 1971 Washington closed the gold window and called it "temporary."
The dollar floated. Trust sank.
Then came the petrodollar.
In 1974 oil was tied to the greenback and the desert handshake replaced the gold peg.
From that moment every price on earth was a foreign policy instrument.
Every crisis became a liquidity operation.
Every war wore the clothes of morality and smelled like crude.
Iraq was not about freedom.
Libya was not about protection.
The Middle East was made an accounting mechanism.
But time does what no coalition can.
China rebuilt the workshops of the world and then the world itself.
Russia learned to sell energy east, build pipelines, and price power as strategy.
The Global South learned to say no and keep the lights on.
BRICS stopped being a headline and became an infrastructure.
Local currency swaps, new payment rails, settlement outside New York, energy deals that never touch a dollar.
Trade began to clear without permission.
Sanctions became the advertisement for exit.
You ask if it is unsustainable.
An empire that offshored its industry, securitized its future, and turned diplomacy into embargo is living on narrative and leverage.
It is sustained by habit and inertia.
Both are expiring.
What you are seeing is not a cliff, it is a transfer.
From tribute to trade.
From monopoly to options.
From rules written in Washington to prices discovered in Shanghai, Mumbai, Johannesburg, SΓ£o Paulo, and Moscow.
France repatriated gold.
Bretton Woods ended.
The petrodollar replaced the promise.
The wars kept the promise alive.
Now BRICS and the Global South are writing a different promise.
Will the United States "fall"?
It will become ordinary.
When oil is routinely sold in other currencies, when reserves are held outside its reach, when allies hedge instead of ask, the spell breaks.
The timeline is simple.
Credibility falls first.
Then the currency premium.
Then the coercion.
You will know it is over when the dollar is optional and no one notices.
If anything, I see myself as a “witness.” I’d also be pleased, if you’d call me an “interpreter.” WIM WENDERS
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