Dedollarization: The Role of Expanded BRICS and the Global South

Dedollarization is accelerating. Inter alia, the US-led western sanctions have accelerated the thinking about dedollarization and some tentative actions in the BRICS countries in particular. Further expansion of BRICS has strengthened these tendencies. With support from the other countries in the Global South, dedollarization will receive continuing impetus. It is one of the main theses of this paper that eventually the US will be forced to settle down to its substantial but reduced role in the Global Economy while a multipolar order replaces the brief ---in historical terms--- the dollar-based US hegemony during the cold war and dollar dominance during the unipolar two decades from 1991 to 2010. However, the pace of this evolution will depend on international politics and strategic foreign policy moves by the major powers and coalitions in both the Global North and the Global South. Thus a historical nodal point has arisen with the advent of the tragic war in Ukraine and the US hostilities towards China. The sanctions regimes of the US-led Global North have compounded the instabilities in the existing system. As the world system moves towards multipolarity, an opportunity exists for the Global South to construct through partial delinking from the post WW2 financial architecture under US hegemony. Construction of an expanded BRICS-led supra regional financial architecture along with regional financial architectures will be a strategic step forward. Within two decades dedollarization will become a reality. Finally, a new non-aligned movement and construction of genuinely pro-people development programs can also become a reality.