People Still Lose The Sight ...

 ... of the issue. No, it doesn't have to be in the US Dollars. 

The ONLY dominating reason for the primacy of the US Dollar (aka Petrodollar) in the hydrocarbons trade was not some magical financial BS, albeit not without it, no--the main reason was a perception that the US CAN enforce the use of a US Dollar by means of its grossly exaggerated military power. Period, everything else was secondary. Now, suddenly, US has been exposed as a military paper tiger and the world took a note. Can US enforce anything with China? Of course not, not to mention the gargantuan scale and diversification of Chinese economy which dwarfs that of the US. Can the US enforce anything against Russia? Well, unlike US military academies and Pentagon, military people around the world actually DO study real military science and operations. They also study REAL military history and they know the score, especially against the background of SMO. Soooo .... ?

You get the picture, right? The US zenith as global economic power is over, if you doubt it--go to Walmart or COSTCO. The main issue now is how to preserve remaining American industrial capacity and expertise. Expansion? Seriously? Military-wise, you all know by now what it all turned out to be--a simulacrum, a projection by Hollywood primarily and by Wehrmacht. US military is obsessed with Wehrmacht as happens with impressionable and obsessive child who endows some adult person with qualities this child desperately wants to posses, not understanding that this adult is just average and lacks those qualities. It is called projection. Read it, read it attentively--it implicitly answers the question why Sarah Paine is "moron with Ph.D." and why the US military is primarily a figment of imagination of people like her. I speak about it in my video today and about how Epistemic Closure looks like. Here is a simpler explanation:

The term "epistemic closure" has been used in an unrelated sense in American political debate to refer to the claim that political belief systems can be closed systems of deduction, unaffected by empirical evidence. This use of the term was popularized by libertarian blogger and commentator Julian Sanchez in 2010 as an extreme form of confirmation bias.

Emphasis on empirical evidence. That is why the US lost all of its wars and lost its grossly exaggerated status as a preeminent global power.