Republican senator: US policies threaten the dollar
Washington, August 1 (Hibya) - The White House has created the first real threat to the dollar and its status as the global reserve currency, US Republican Senator Mike Lee said in an interview with journalist and political commentator Tucker Carlson.
In the two-hour interview, broadcast by the former Fox News host on his YouTube channel on Tuesday, Lee said that US unilateral sanctions policies have delegitimized the so-called rules-based international order Washington claims to uphold.
According to the senator, US officials have managed to unite Russia, China, and Iran, which are major global economic players and have to deal with a strong incentive to eliminate the dollar, especially in energy transactions.
'And in the meantime, we've put forward the first major threat to the US dollar as the world's reserve currency that we've seen in our lifetime,' Lee said, emphasizing that 'twenty years ago, no matter where you were in the world, all oil transactions were done in dollars.
'That's starting to not be the case anymore,' Lee said, warning that this was 'very chilling' because the strength and widespread use of the dollar benefitted the whole of the United States significantly.
The global trend for countries to use their national currencies in trade instead of the US dollar gained significant momentum after Russia, one of the world's largest oil producers and exporters, was cut off from the Western financial system and its foreign exchange reserves frozen in 2022.
Lee concluded: “So in the name of protecting the rules of the international order, we have weakened those rules; we have made ourselves vulnerable in the name of ensuring the economic and military security of the United States.”
The freezing of Russian state assets in February 2022 was an unprecedented move. Many experts in the West, including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have warned against any attempt to seize these funds, saying it could damage the dollar, the euro and the entire global financial system.
Albania News Agency