With the official start of India’s BRICS presidency in January 2026 and New Delhi summit scheduled for September, international debate is increasingly focusing not on the birth of an unlikely “BRICS currency,” but rather on the construction of payment systems alternative to those dominated by the United States.
This is the real strategic issue running through the current global economic war: not only which currencies will be used in international trade, but above all who will control the infrastructures through which global payments will pass.
According to reports published by Reuters, New Delhi is reportedly considering presenting at the 2026 BRICS summit a proposal to connect the sovereign digital currencies of member countries and facilitate cross-border payments without relying entirely on the dollar-dominated system.
The project would involve the possibility of progressively connecting the digital yuan, digital rupee, digital ruble, and other emerging sovereign financial instruments within a common network capable of reducing dependence on the system dominated by SWIFT and the dollar.
The politically most interesting aspect is that this initiative appears to come not from China or Russia, traditionally more confrontational in their criticism of the Western financial order, but from India, the BRICS country that more than any other seeks to balance cooperation with the West and strategic autonomy. Precisely for this reason, the proposal takes on broader significance: if even New Delhi considers it useful to develop alternative financial infrastructures, this suggests that dependence on the dollar-centered monetary system has become a strategic concern for a large part of the Global South.
To understand the scope of this transformation, one must start from a fundamental consideration. The power of the dollar derives not only from the fact that it represents the world’s main international currency. American strength above all stems from control over the entire global financial architecture built over recent decades: bond markets, correspondent banks, financial agencies, payment circuits, and above all the SWIFT system.
For more than half a century this system was based on the petrodollar model born in 1974 with the agreement between Washington and Saudi Arabia. That pact, based on the principle of “security for oil,” guaranteed American military protection in exchange for oil being sold exclusively in dollars and for the reinvestment of oil surpluses into U.S. Treasuries.
It was this mechanism that transformed the dollar into the pillar of the global economy. For decades the United States has been able to finance its public debt at relatively low costs thanks to global demand for dollars and American securities. The so-called “exorbitant privilege” already denounced in the 1970s by Europeans derived precisely from this: Washington could issue debt in a currency that the rest of the world was compelled to use.
Today, however, this balance is progressively being called into question. Trade wars, the increasingly aggressive use of economic sanctions, the freezing of Russian reserves after the Ukrainian conflict, and growing geopolitical tensions have pushed many emerging powers to question the risks deriving from excessive dependence on the American financial infrastructure.
The central issue is not the dollar itself, but the fact that much of international payments must pass through networks directly or indirectly controlled by the United States. This is what gives Washington an extraordinary capacity for geopolitical pressure.
When a bank is excluded from SWIFT or loses access to the dollar payment system, it risks being cut off from global trade. The sanctions against Russia have concretely demonstrated how the financial system can be transformed into a geopolitical weapon.
It is in this context that the growth of the Chinese CIPS must be understood. Indeed the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System has been developed by Beijing to facilitate international payments in yuan.
In 2024 CIPS processed approximately 175.5 trillion yuan, equivalent to around 24.5 trillion dollars. This figure is significant and demonstrates the speed of Chinese growth. However, it should not be interpreted as overtaking SWIFT. The Western system remains considerably larger, with over 50 million financial messages per day and a global network involving more than 11,000 financial institutions.
Moreover, approximately 80% of CIPS transactions still use SWIFT messaging. This means that China does not yet possess a completely autonomous infrastructure independent from the Western system.
But this is precisely where the real geopolitical significance of the ongoing transformation lies. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, there exists a credible alternative financial network, supported by the world’s second-largest economy and increasingly integrated with the emerging economies of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
China is not yet replacing the American system, but it is building a parallel architecture capable of progressively reducing the Western monopoly over international payments.
This evolution is directly linked to the new frontier of economic warfare: digital currencies.
In recent years public debate has focused above all on private cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. In reality, the most important strategic confrontation concerns CBDCs, namely digital currencies issued by central banks.
China is currently the most advanced country in this sector. The digital yuan is already being tested on a large scale and could become a fundamental instrument for carrying out international payments without passing through the American financial system.
Consequently, the geopolitical conflict is progressively extending from control over traditional energy resources to domination of digital infrastructures and technological capability. However, this transformation does not mean that energy and raw materials have lost their centrality.
On the contrary, the transition toward an increasingly digital economy based on artificial intelligence entails enormous energy consumption: data centers, cloud computing, semiconductors, and AI systems require growing quantities of electricity, advanced infrastructure networks, and strategic supply chains. In this context, Washington aims to strengthen the centrality of the dollar by leveraging its technological superiority in the key sectors of the digital economy. Dollar-pegged stablecoins, digital financial platforms, and control over major technological infrastructures could thus become instruments through which the United States continues to project its global economic and monetary influence.
The shift from oil to digital, therefore, does not eliminate the energy dimension of power, but redefines the relationship between energy, technology, and finance within the new global geopolitical competition.
And it is here that a fundamental paradox emerges. Many observers believed that the digital revolution would weaken the dollar. So far, the opposite has occurred.
The world’s leading stablecoins, such as Tether and USD Coin, are in fact pegged to the dollar and are contributing to extending the influence of the American currency in the digital world. The stablecoin market now exceeds 200 billion dollars and represents a sort of “private digital dollar” used throughout the world.
In other words, while China attempts to build an alternative financial ecosystem based on CBDCs and sovereign payment systems, the United States is transforming the dollar into the dominant currency of the global digital economy as well.
A new form of international monetary competition is thus emerging. On the one hand there is the Chinese model, more centralized and state-controlled, founded on public infrastructures and sovereign digital currencies. On the other hand there is the American model, more market-oriented, based on the technological superiority of private platforms and on the expansion of dollar-denominated stablecoins.
In this scenario the New Delhi BRICS summit could represent a symbolically important moment. Not because an alternative currency to the dollar will be born, a hypothesis that today remains unrealistic, but because it could accelerate the construction of multipolar financial infrastructures.
The real historical transformation does not in fact consist in the immediate replacement of the dollar with the yuan, but rather in the progressive end of the American infrastructural monopoly.
For decades almost every major international payment had to pass, directly or indirectly, through the Western financial system. Tomorrow different networks could coexist: the American digital dollar, the Chinese CIPS circuit, BRICS digital currencies, private stablecoins, and interoperable regional systems. The world could thus enter a phase of controlled monetary fragmentation.
The dollar will probably remain the world’s main global currency for a long time. The United States still possesses the deepest financial markets, the most advanced technologies, and the highest level of international trust. However, its geopolitical power could progressively diminish insofar as other actors succeed in building infrastructures capable of bypassing the American financial system.
The economic war of the twenty-first century is therefore not fought only through trade tariffs or raw materials. It is fought above all over control of digital networks, payment systems, and the monetary infrastructures of the future. And the New Delhi BRICS summit could represent one of the most important stages of this historical transformation.
Author: Alberto Cossu – International Management Consultant, collaborating with research institutes and government agencies on strategic and geopolitical analysis. He is a Geopolitical Analyst at Vision & Global Trends and a regular contributor to the journal Geopolitica. His work is also published in prominent Italian policy and defense outlets, including Airpress – Formiche, Analisi Difesa, and Digit-export, the online magazine of the Union of Chambers of Commerce of Lombardy. His research focuses on global geopolitical dynamics, with particular emphasis on the United States, India, Russia, China, and the Middle East, as well as on the strategic implications of innovation and emerging technologies in the evolving international order.
(The views expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights).