Who needs aircraft carriers, stealth bombers or attack drones? The US has a much more powerful weapon to impose its foreign policy on the world: the dollar.
Just ask BNP Paribas. Last week France’s biggest bank by assets agreed to pay an almost $9bn fine, submit two guilty pleas and impose an unprecedented one-year suspension of US dollar clearing rights on its oil and gas financing arm.
The bank admitted handling transactions for clients in Sudan, Iran and Cuba when these countries were under US sanctions. BNP did not break French law. But because the transactions were settled in dollars they exposed the lender to the full weight of American law. BNP’s settlement is the harshest penalty ever imposed on a foreign bank by US authorities, easily outstripping its annual net profits. It became the first big global bank in decades to plead guilty to criminal charges.