Kissinger and the petrodollar
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Kissinger and the petrodollar is John Kiriakou's endorsement of the theory that Henry Kissinger restructured the 1970s petrodollar system to make the United States reliant on Middle Eastern oil, creating a standing excuse for "future world police." He illustrates it with a friend and former CIA officer turned oil-company engineer: fracking is only cost-effective above roughly 60 dollars a barrel, and with oil over 110, the U.S. does frack, but exports that oil to Japan while importing Middle Eastern crude, purely to maintain the tie. As much as he hates Kissinger, "the butcher of Cyprus, of Chile, of Cambodia", Kiriakou says on this Kissinger "was telling us the truth"; the "butcher" formula and the oil-policy defense recur together across his appearances.

Kiriakou dates the "butcher of Cyprus" charge to 1967, when Kissinger, holding no official title but advising President Johnson, urged Johnson to greenlight the military junta's overthrow of the Greek government, reasoning that Greek communists were poised to win the next election. Decades later, after leaving government, Kiriakou worked for a period at Kissinger McClarty Associates, the Washington consultancy Kissinger co-founded, later renamed McClarty Associates after Kissinger's departure, where Bill Clinton's former chief of staff Mac McClarty gave him an office and a part-time secretary.

Kiriakou traces the historical pattern behind the petrodollar to the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, which he says was carried out on Britain's behalf to protect British oil interests after the British persuaded [[kermit-roosevelt]], Theodore Roosevelt's grandson and a senior CIA officer, to engineer it. Once, as a brand-new CIA officer, Kiriakou met Kissinger in person; years later, a Nicosia, Cyprus taxi driver, unprompted, asked him if he "knew Kissinger" and then answered his own question: "the butcher of Cyprus." Kiriakou calls Kissinger "the butcher of Cyprus, the butcher of Chile" and says he is still largely dictating U.S. foreign policy through acolytes such as John Bolton and Hillary Clinton, recalling that Clinton traveled to New York to meet Kissinger in his condo, press present, so he could advise her on foreign policy during her 2008 primary campaign. He connects this protective impulse toward figures like Kissinger to the "Hague Invasion Act," originally passed under George W. Bush and reauthorized under Trump, which authorizes U.S. military force to free any American accused of war crimes at the International Criminal Court, effectively, he says, permitting the invasion of a NATO country.

Sanctions, Kuwait, and Venezuela: policing the petrodollar

Kiriakou says the pattern Kissinger set, tying U.S. policy to the currency oil is sold in, still governs Washington's reaction whenever a country deviates from the dollar. In 2023, Saudi Arabia struck an oil sales deal with China priced in yuan rather than dollars, breaking a precedent on dollar-denominated oil transactions dating to the 1930s. He says a similar, earlier episode involved Kuwait: around 2018,2019, and again roughly a year and a half before a 2026 interview, Kuwait sold China a shipment of oil and accepted payment in yuan, the first major oil deal brokered outside the dollar, prompting the U.S. Treasury Department to "demarche" the Kuwaitis until they promised not to do it again. Kiriakou frames this as "more about the dollar than about the oil," and says it was part of the motive for overthrowing Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, another country moving to sell oil outside the dollar system.

After the U.S. sanctioned Venezuela's oil industry, Kiriakou says China built a new refinery in the Turks and Caicos Islands to process Venezuela's dirty, high-sulfur crude, oil that previously could only be refined on the Texas Gulf Coast, allowing Venezuela to ship directly to China and India instead. Once Maduro ended up, in Kiriakou's words, "sitting in the dock in New York City," the new president, Delcy Rodríguez, told the White House she would do whatever it wanted; the U.S. president then met with American oil executives to divide up Venezuelan oil among them equally, which Kiriakou calls illegal. He argues the U.S. opposes any unified BRICS currency for the same reason, warning it would crash the American economy by making U.S. Treasury bills unattractive to foreign investors, the dollar's ability to be printed freely, he says, depends on it remaining the currency fossil fuels are sold in. He compares a hypothetical unified BRICS currency to Muammar Gaddafi's push for a pan-African gold-backed currency, noting the U.S. could not realistically respond to China, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa acting together the way it did to Libya alone.

The moves away from the dollar

Kiriakou has catalogued the departures from dollar settlement as evidence of what he calls poor planning in managing an empire. Saudi Arabia and China agreed for oil to be paid in yuan; Kuwait made the same arrangement with China. Since the sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has insisted its business be conducted outside the dollar, and he says that has worked. He also points to discussion among Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and possibly Chile of a common South American currency that would remove the need for dollars.

He accepted his interviewer's figure for the scale of the shift, a fall in the dollar's share of international transactions to around 47 per cent, from 82 per cent, without disputing it.

See also

- Permanent wartime economy
- Maduro Capture
