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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

[EDIT] While I agree, STRONGLY with this action,

I also worry that kicking Russia out of SWIFT, could make them partners with China and others in hastening the demise of the PetroDollar.

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So you're worried about Russia (already a strong ally of China) will ally with China? You're worried that Russia (having spent the last decade trying to decouple itself from the dollar) will try and decouple itself from the dollar?

Russia is marauding about Ukraine and people are arguing against doing the bare minimum because they're worried Russia will change payment systems. Russia has already built their own alternative to SWIFT and will eventually switch to it regardless.

> Russia has already built their own alternative to SWIFT and will eventually switch to it regardless.

What's the alternative? Any source(s)?

CIPS & SPFS.

TBH, anything that stops the blatant abuse of international systems for political goals by the hegemony looks good for me.

Russia is embarking on a war of territorial aggression against its weaker neighbour in an effort to establish its own regional hegemony (see: Eurasian Economic Union and Commonwealth of Independent States). But no, you’re right, the real injustice here is locking Russia out of SWIFT.

You don't have to worry about that. They have been reducing their reliance on USD for everything over the past couple of years[1][2]. The West has been asleep and drunk on its ignorance for a while now.

China has been selling services to Iran for oil for years now. Instead of actually paying for it in currency.

You can only threaten sanctions so many times when the other side is a world power. Trumps America showed that the US a bit of a toothless tiger when they didn't retaliate after Iran shot rockets at their Iraq military base.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/russias-bid-to-ditch-the-us-...

[2] https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/russia-s-583...

Trump had a top Iranian general missiled. And Iran sat there and took it with laudable stoicism because they aren't stupid and could see they had nothing to do. America was anything but toothless in those years and Iran wasn't about to call any bluffs.

And funny you should bring up Iraq in these troubled times, because I think the recent conflict Russia->Ukraine is most comparable to - outside of Russia->Other Neighbours - is US->Iraq. Assuming the situation calms down rather than escalating.

I think US/Iraq is not a good analogy. The USA got rid of a really bad dictator and the majority of Iraqs were happy about that --- but social divisions crippled the aftermath. OTOH Ukraine has a democratically elected government and is pretty unified against Russia right now.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimel...

Trump assassinated basically Iran’s Vice President and they “retaliated” with a missile attack on a US base. That didn’t kill any soldiers. If anything it showed that Iran was powerless in the face of US aggression.

The US assassinated a key Iranian leader, while Iran did property damage to an empty US military base in order to save face. It sure looks like we got the better end of that deal.

Didn't retaliate? Was the killing of the top Iranian commander by drone before or after this rocket shelling?

Partner? No, they don't have equal weight. Russia is economically and technologically insignificant in global sense. Russia would become China's puppet and the speed of China's economic and demographic takeover of Russia's Far East would only increase.

China would have to decide whether to risk their relationships with the rest of the world though. Russia's economy isn't that strong, so it wouldn't really be a big financial benefit compared to, say, all of Europe and the US.

What might be a compelling argument is that China gets a lot more influence in Russia, e.g. the space to move in there and exploit Russia's natural resources. But they need to make the tradeoff whether that's worth it.

China may get sanctioned, taxed, and generally lose reputation if they help Russia mitigate the effects of international sanctions.

Still better than letting them stay and show how weak the western liberal democracies are.

It’s a done deal. This war is the contract.

We'll deal with that when we have to, until then it would really hurt Putin's chances to wage this war for long.

If the US cuts off Russia from SWIFT, Putin has stated that it would mean war. I'm no military expert but my older brother who's an officer told me that he worries that Russia would immediately start cutting undersea cables that carry data across the Atlantic Ocean and basically cut off the US from Europe. That would cause billions of dollars worth of damage to Western economies every single day.

They already sent a message [1].

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43828/undersea-cable-c...

SWIFT doesn't mean much. Bank transactions can be done by other means, which happened recently. It's speed and convenience, but not qualitative difference.

International transfer happen all with swift. Europe has its system (IBAN) but still swift is what is used internationally

I think you mean SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) not IBAN (IBAN is an account number - International Bank Account Number, also used in SWIFT transfers)

Ya sorry. IBAN is what is used for SEPA payments. You don't have the same with swift since system and code are named (again) swift.

I never used IBAN outside of Europe (actually Dubai if I'm not wrong used that too) so I'm not sure how international that is

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