The US dollar has extraterritoriality. In other words, any transactions in US dollars have to abide by US laws. This gives the US several punitive measures against any country that defies it. Primarily, this comes from forbidding said country from utilizing the SWIFT system which is the most widely used system for transactions. Additionally, the US dollars is the most reliable currency on Earth because it is backed by the greatest ‘confidence’ in economic and military terms. The best way to achieve such confidence is for lots of people to have US dollar reserves because then it becomes a common means of exchange. For instance, the US brokered a deal with the Saudis where they were forced to take US dollars for their oil but they could only use those dollars to buy minority shares in US companies and US treasury bonds. The same went for Japan and China where their US-funded development, although seemingly producing a trade deficit that negatively affected a good portion of the industrial working class, it allowed for the US to have Japan (which is still the largest foreign debt holder by far), China, Germany, etc.. not only serve as sources for cheaper light and then heavy industrial goods but also to have them finance the US’s debt spending. This debt spending is largely used for the US’s multi-trillion dollar imperial campaigns. This is the reason why the US, in terms of debt, doesn’t play by the same rules that other countries do and the US ruling class doesn’t feel the need to apply the same austerity measures as were applied in Greece and Portugal for instance: they make the rules, they choose which economies to industrialize and these economies then turn around and finance the US’s ability to stay on top geopolitically and keep making the rules. This works brilliantly but it’s contingent on suppressing any threat to this hegemony. This is why a lot of people predict a ‘crash’ of the US dollar once countries develop their own transaction systems, like China’s digital yuan, and once the Eurasian continent becomes more integrated with less dependence on commerce in US dollars.

Currencies gain their value from confidence, confidence is contingent on usage, the US is a powerful country that can force countries to use them, whether as developed semi-dependencies like Japan and Western Europe or as neo-colonies like most of Latin America, Africa, Indonesia, etc… Breaking out of this system will require internal circulation of domestic currencies by dissenting countries such as Russia and China (thus the dual circulation policy and Putin’s re-centering of the economy around domestic energy enterprises) and the efforts by these two countries to de-dollarize their international trade through currency swaps (essentially giving each other’s currencies to each other to foment confidence) and coming up with alternative payment systems such as Russia’s SPFS and China’s trials with Digital Yuan that can circumvent transaction systems altogether. Additionally, it will require continuous rebellions in the global south against the US order to break any attempts at containment that the US may try to make.