Then in 1944, a new monetary system emerged at Bretton Woods. Under that system, the dollar became the global reserve currency, linked to gold at $35 per ounce. In 1971 Nixon ended the direct convertibility of the dollar to gold. For the first time, the monetary system had no gold backing.

Today, the existing monetary system is over 50 years old, so the world is long overdue for a change.

I've written for years about different nations' persistent efforts to dethrone the U.S. dollar as the leading global reserve currency and the main medium of exchange.

At the same time, I've said that such processes don't happen overnight; instead, they happen slowly and incrementally over decades.

While that's true, the process is accelerating in ways no one could have anticipated before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response, the U.S. initiated the most aggressive sanctions regime ever in its efforts to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.

The first round of financial targets included obvious attacks such as freezing the U.S. dollar accounts of Russian banks and oligarchs. The second round raised the ante by freezing the dollar accounts of the Central Bank of Russia itself. This was unprecedented except in the case of rogue states such as Iran, North Korea and Syria.

Suddenly the central bank of the world's ninth-largest economy and third-largest oil producer with over $2.1 trillion in GDP found itself shut out of the global payments and banking systems.

The sanctions went beyond finance and banking to include bans on Russian exports, freezing Russia out of insurance markets (as a way to effectively prohibit oil shipments) and bans on critical exports to Russia including high-tech equipment, semiconductors and popular consumer goods.

Major U.S. and other Western companies from Shell Oil to McDonald's were pressured to shut down operations in Russia, and many did.

But a large part of the world refused to join the U.S./EU/NATO financial sanctions. It's not that countries around the world necessarily supported Russia's invasion. It's just that they didn't want U.S. sanctions to disrupt their trading relationships with Russia, which they depend on.