Authored by Antonio Graceffo via The Epoch Times,
Despite sanctions and two wars, the yuan is losing ground, with much of its earlier rise tied to Russia and now reversing.
The Kremlin drafted a memo this year outlining seven areas of potential economic convergence with Washington, including a proposed return to dollar settlement for Russian energy transactions. The stated rationale in the memo is that dollar integration would stabilize Russia’s balance of payments and foreign exchange markets. Russia never actually wanted to transact business in yuan. Moscow only did so because it was cut off from the dollar system by sanctions and had no choice.
The yuan was a fallback, not a preference. Russia’s desire to return to a dollar-denominated trade regimen is an implicit admission that the yuan-based arrangement failed to deliver monetary stability. It also demonstrates Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desire to decrease Russia’s dependence on China. Putin has many ambitions for Russia’s future, but among them is not for Russia to be the No. 2 power in a Beijing-centered world order.
Heading into the U.S.–Iran conflict, many pundits believed it would bring about the demise of the dollar while accelerating the internationalization of the yuan.
Bloomberg ran a piece titled “The Iran War Is China’s Global Payments Debut,” arguing it took four years of preparation after Ukraine, and this war, to make the yuan a serious contender.
The South China Morning Post cited analysts saying disruptions from the war could accelerate a shift in oil trade and threaten the dollar’s long-held dominance.
Deutsche Bank’s FX Managing Director Mallika Sachdeva wrote in March that the Iran war could be remembered as a catalyst for “erosion in petrodollar dominance, and the beginnings of the petroyuan.”
However, none of these predictions came true.
In fact, the Iranian Embassy in Zimbabwe posted that it was time to add the “petroyuan” to the global oil market, and Iran demanded that tankers be allowed passage only if trade was denominated in yuan.
But to date, the only confirmation is from Lloyd’s List that two ships paid a toll, and there is no clear evidence that the toll was paid in yuan. Lloyd’s List has also not released the names of the ships; therefore, they may very well have been Chinese-flagged vessels that paid a toll, allowing China to claim that de-dollarization was underway.
The logic behind their belief that dollar dominance would be damaged by this conflict was that the United States used sanctions and dollar-system exclusion as a primary weapon against Iran, just as it did against Russia. Every time Washington weaponizes the dollar, it gives non-Western countries an incentive to build off-ramps. Iran, China, and Russia all have a motive to route energy trade outside SWIFT and dollar settlement.
A major U.S. military and financial confrontation with Iran could have been expected to accelerate that, pushing Iranian oil sales into yuan, deepening CIPS usage, and giving China a showcase for an alternative system. However, the data shows the opposite. The dollar has lost no ground, and the yuan has made no gains. If Russia re-dollarizes, the yuan will lose much of its already small share of global trade.
The yuan’s global footprint does not support the internationalization narrative that Russia’s sanctions-driven shift was used to bolster. IMF COFER data for Q3 2025 put the yuan’s share of global foreign exchange reserves at 1.93 percent, down from 1.99 percent in the prior quarter, compared to the dollar’s 56.92 percent. The SWIFT November 2025 RMB Tracker recorded the yuan’s share of global payments at 2.94 percent, falling to 2.71 percent in February 2026.
Between 2020 and 2024, the yuan’s share of global trade settlement roughly doubled, rising from around 2 percent to a peak of 4.7 percent, according to SWIFT RMB Tracker data. That headline gain drove widespread claims that the yuan was displacing the dollar as the world’s trading currency. The reality is more complicated.
To understand how much of that gain was genuine organic growth versus a single sanctions-driven relationship, it is possible to estimate the dollar amounts involved. Global merchandise trade ran from approximately $17.6 trillion in 2020 to $24.4 trillion in 2024, meaning total yuan-settled trade grew from roughly $350 billion to $1.15 trillion, an increase of approximately $800 billion.
Over the same period, Russia–China bilateral trade grew from around $117 billion to $245 billion, with yuan settlement going from near zero before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to roughly 60 percent of bilateral trade by 2024, a gain of approximately $145 billion in yuan-settled flows. That one corridor, therefore, accounts for an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the entire global increase in yuan trade settlement.
If Russia shifts back to the dollar, the yuan will lose part of its current 2.71 percent share of global trade settlement. In short, the yuan is not gaining internationalization, the dollar is not losing ground, and even two parallel wars, one in Ukraine and one in Iran, have not been sufficient to accelerate the yuan’s adoption as an international trade currency.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Sat, 04/25/2026 - 23:20What has become extraordinarily clear is that nearly every data center, stadium, government building, power plant, substation, and other critical infrastructure site shares one major vulnerability: the lack of a low-cost, early-warning detection layer against one-way attack drones.
Additionally, Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) architecture should include a kinetic countermeasure layer designed to defeat threats before impact. Without this layered approach, most critical infrastructure remains highly vulnerable to cheap kamikaze drones.
When reports emerge, such as the recent case in New Jersey where 15 crop-spraying drones were reportedly stolen in what investigators described as a sophisticated, coordinated theft, it only reinforces the alarming security concern: these drones, with meaningful payload capacity, can be easily repurposed into weaponized platforms.
The national security news outlet The High Side reports that the FBI is worried about the theft of these drones, as experts warn of "ridiculously bad" consequences and "a potential nightmare scenario" if bad actors weaponize these low-cost flying machines.
"The bureau is freaked out for a good reason," Steve Lazarus, a retired FBI agent, told the local outlet.
Lazarus continued, "These aren't hobby drones with cameras. They're industrial sprayers designed to carry and disperse significant amounts of liquid quickly and with precision. A typical agricultural drone can cover a large area in minutes, following GPS-guided paths — that's exactly what they're built for in farming, but it also means that, in the wrong hands, they're a ready-made delivery system."
While The High Side and investigators are "spooked" by the theft and the mounting risk that these drones could be used to "disperse biological agents," the greater threat is actually their payload capacity and the potential for these drones to be weaponized into low-cost, one-way attack drones.
The assessment we provided at the beginning of the note is that the glaring gap in layered air defenses against small drones in high-value areas will only open the door to advanced, low-cost solutions, such as passive acoustic counter-drone detection, outlined here. Some of these C-UAS systems may soon be imported from companies that currently have deployments in Ukraine.
Tyler Durden Sat, 04/25/2026 - 22:45Authored by Timothy Murphy via RealClearDefense,
The Strait of Hormuz reminds us that a single chokepoint can shape the global economy overnight. What most policymakers miss is that space has its own version of Hormuz—and we are rapidly losing control of it. Multiple sectors of the global economy are dependent on access to the Strait of Hormuz, but nations are becoming ever more reliant upon access to space to drive their economies. Similar to the Strait, the key corridor in space is Low Earth Orbit (LEO). All space systems are dependent upon access to it (either directly or indirectly), and the security of LEO and freedom of maneuver in space will increasingly rely upon Artificial Intelligence (AI). Success will come from AI’s capabilities in advancing commercial space activity, responding to current and future threats in space, and ensuring AI dominance through American control of the AI supply chain.
AI is fundamental to maintaining U.S. advantages in commercial space activity. Many people still do not realize the extent of U.S. military involvement in all international space activity - both military and commercial. During my time standing up current operations at U.S. Space Command, we saw the volume and speed of activity in space explode beyond what human operators could effectively track in real time. That gap is only widening. The Space Force operates a Space Surveillance Network that monitors the space environment and tracks all artificial objects in Earth’s orbit. U.S. and foreign companies use this data to launch satellites, avoid debris, and ensure their systems do not conflict with other objects in space. The surveillance network has always relied upon complex algorithms, and as the volume and complexity of space-based activity increases, AI compute will be increasingly necessary.
Providing this surveillance and tracking service will also advance U.S. advantages in the development of the commercial space industry. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and its preceding organizations played a critical role in solidifying air commerce as an economic force in the 20th century. U.S. development of the FAA ensured control over the global air industry which has generated wealth, economic benefits, and advanced logistics for over 100 years. America is on track to have similar influence over the development of space commerce, but AI will be critical to ensuring the expansion of surveillance, tracking, and deconfliction of space assets. The country that successfully employs AI capabilities to accomplish these functions will have the most influence on the future of the space industry.
While AI will be critical to commercial space development, it is absolutely necessary to counter the quantity and capabilities of current threats, much less future ones. Existing threats to the space domain are significant and not well understood. The dominant adversary is China, which has over 1,300 satellites in orbit and maintains multiple systems (in space and on earth) that can target U.S. and allied space systems. China’s threats to space represent a range from destructive weapons to high-power laser weapons and powerful jammers. A coordinated Chinese effort to jam or blind satellites in LEO wouldn’t just affect military systems. It would disrupt GPS, financial transactions, logistics, and communications simultaneously. Much of China’s efforts to deter and defeat the U.S. rely heavily on their counter-space plans and capabilities. China could attempt to deploy those capabilities to hamper U.S. operations in LEO and thus disrupt the key “choke point” for space access.
Much of China’s efforts to deter and defeat the U.S. rely heavily on their counter-space plans and capabilities. If deployed, they could directly disrupt U.S. operations in LEO and threaten access to this critical choke point. The U.S. cannot rely on human operators alone to respond. AI will be essential for detection, tracking, threat analysis, and real-time response to adversary actions. It can also provide decision-makers with options at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. These are capabilities the U.S. must accelerate in the years ahead.
In space, AI is not an efficiency tool. It is the only way to maintain control. To realize these advantages, the United States must confront a harder truth: AI is only as strong as the supply chain behind it. If the U.S. does not control the AI stack—from chips to training data—it will not control the space domain. And today, that stack is globally fragmented and exposed.
U.S.-based Nvidia’s GPUs power much of the AI ecosystem but systems like the GB200 rely on hundreds of global suppliers. That creates real vulnerability but also reflects reality. The U.S. cannot retreat from global markets without ceding influence. Selling American AI abroad sets standards, builds dependence, and keeps U.S. companies at the center of the ecosystem. The challenge is not whether to engage, but how. The U.S. should protect its most advanced capabilities from adversaries like China while avoiding broad export controls that weaken its own industrial base.
The world has seen how a single chokepoint can shape the global economy. Space has its own chokepoint that it is becoming more critical by the year. AI will determine who can operate in that domain and who cannot. The country that builds and supplies that infrastructure will not just compete in space. It will define it.
Col Timothy Murphy (U.S. Air Force, ret.) is a former national security affairs fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 2019 to 2020, he served as the first Chief of Current Operations for U.S. Space Command.
Tyler Durden Sat, 04/25/2026 - 22:10