BRICS is not some counter balance to the US petro dollar. It is at best a coffee claque of countries with the most currency controls of any major economies and at worse a Chinese op to make the yuan more powerful. But the problem is that none of the BRICS nations want a market currency! They want a less dominant USD (which I personally think is understandable but short sighted) but they haven’t offered a viable alternative.

That is to say they each want their own currency to be as valuable as USD but haven’t done the things it would take to make that happen.

I don’t think it is “fair” that the USD is dominant but I think that oil settlement in other currencies is much less detrimental to USD than many people think. Again, if you can settle oil in your currency, you’ve effectively put it in competition with USD. The Chinese government has been fighting that outcome for as long as there has been modern Chinese currency, and frankly every other currency besides INR doesn’t matter for this conversation and INR also has been very controlled.

People seem to have it backwards. Global trade attaches to liberal currencies because that’s good for global trade. The US has the most liberal currency of all time (and the most liberal currency currently even with Russian sanctions) and that makes it the petro currency. If the yuan or the rupee liberalize enough to take over the petro trade then there won’t be much impact on usd but if they don’t then market forces will hurt them more than the US.

The thing that might cause a USD fall is a default on usd debt or the us becoming more conservative on their currency controls but there is so far to go on that compared to their comps it’s hard to extrapolate.

I don’t have opinions on Putins desires, it’s outside of my understanding. But picking the Chinese in a relationship where they have more powers than the previous relationship with Europe seems crazy to me. But international politics is not my sphere.