The Kuwaiti cargo in yuan
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Turning an October 2025 interview from Middle Eastern politics to international finance, John Kiriakou offered a single transaction as the marker of a larger shift.

The cargo

A year earlier, he said, the Kuwaitis sold a shipment of oil to the Chinese, and "for the first time ever, the Chinese paid for that shipment in yuan, not in dollars."

He added that there was now talk of the Saudis dealing with the Chinese in yuan rather than dollars as well. "It seems to me that that's the first step toward the end of the American empire."

The second step

Beyond bilateral settlement he identified a further stage: talk of the BRICS countries eventually creating a unified currency on the model of the euro. "That would be the death knell for the dollar," he said, and asked whether the United States could still hold its position in international finance.

The answer he got

His guest's reply was that invading Venezuela and waging war in the Middle East on Israel's behalf would not stop the process but accelerate it, and that a unified currency remained distant, though a functioning alternative to the SWIFT messaging system was already operating and, he had been told, worked better. Everything routed through Shanghai rather than New York, and so lay outside the reach of sanctions.

On the reserve currency itself the guest was less alarmed than Kiriakou's question implied, reporting that Chinese officials had told him they did not want the role and were content for the United States to keep it.

Placing the claim

Kiriakou's contribution here is the datum and the framing rather than the forecast: one cargo, one currency, dated to roughly a year before the conversation, treated as the visible edge of a change he expects to continue. He does not name the seller, the buyer or the volume, and the transaction is reported as he described it on air.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kissinger and the petrodollar
