Energy economist Anas Alhajji makes the strongest case against the de-dollarization story: BRICS is a paper tiger, the petrodollar is here to stay, and the Gulf trip deepened dollar integration. Plus why 'drill baby drill' is over, and the power crunch nobody is pricing.
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Any serious macro conversation needs a skeptic, and Anas Alhajji is ours. He is one of the most respected independent energy economists in the world, and he came on the show fresh off the May 2025 Gulf trip with a view that runs straight against the dollar-collapse narrative you hear everywhere on this side of the internet. His read is blunt, and he wants you to hear it plainly before anything else: the de-dollarization story is overcooked, and the people selling it are reading a wish as a forecast.
That is exactly why this conversation matters. The Petrodollar, Explained argues the system is fraying at the edges, and the honest version of that argument has to survive its best critic. Alhajji is that critic. Where the macro bulls see a reset, he sees a dollar order that just pulled the Gulf closer, an oil market hostage to China, and a coming energy crunch that has nothing to do with currencies at all.
Alhajji does not hedge the headline claim:
"BRICS is a paper tiger, period. It's over. All this talk about the rise of BRICS and the currency and all that stuff, it's complete nonsense. Everything about BRICS is what China does, and that's it. The dollar is here to stay and the petrodollar is here to stay. End of story."
His reasoning is structural, not patriotic. A common currency requires a depth of political and institutional convergence that took Europe three centuries to build and another forty years to turn into the euro, and even then Europe started from genuine similarities. China, India, and Brazil share almost nothing of the kind, and several BRICS members are outright adversaries. He points to the India-Pakistan clash, with China backing Pakistan, as a live demonstration: you cannot run a monetary union with members fighting proxy wars against each other. So the idea of a BRICS currency replacing the dollar is, to him, a category error.
The Gulf trip sharpened the point. Read as an investment mission rather than a diplomatic one, the deals tell the story: Saudi and Qatari contracts with Boeing, a coordinated push to move the Gulf onto American AI infrastructure instead of Chinese chips, and, in his framing, a deliberate effort to pull the rug out from under both China and Europe. He treats it as an extension of the trade war by other means, and the result is the opposite of de-dollarization. The Gulf came away more tied to the dollar system, not less. This is the bear case that The Petrodollar, Explained takes seriously, put by the person who argues it best.
To his credit, Alhajji does not pretend the dollar system is airtight, and the one real crack he names is precise. Iran sells its oil almost entirely to China now, and crucially, China pays for it through the Chinese payment system, with a designated bank holding the revenue. Iran then shops in China and settles against that account, and anything it needs from outside China gets imported into China first and re-exported. None of it touches the dollar, the international banking system, or US jurisdiction. That is why he is so dismissive of the idea that sanctions can take Iran's exports to zero, the way they cut more than a million barrels a day in 2019. The 2018-to-2019 playbook worked because Iran was still selling to twenty-plus countries; today Iran has matched its crude grades to Chinese refineries, shut the fields China's refiners don't want, and routed the whole flow through a settlement rail Washington can't see. The honest reading is the one he gives: this is a workaround built for a sanctioned state, not the template for a new global order. But it is also a live, working example of energy trading settled entirely outside the dollar, which is exactly the kind of crack the petrodollar story is watching for.
On Iran's nuclear program, Alhajji has been consistent for two decades, since he wrote a piece calling it "the never-ending crisis." The deadlock is structural. Washington, regardless of administration, treats even a peaceful Iranian nuclear program as a threat, because cheap domestic power would stabilize the regime and free up more oil and gas to export. Tehran wants exactly that stability and reads its own history, two rulers toppled from the streets rather than from abroad, as proof that internal pressure is the real danger. The compromise that would work on paper, Iran buying enriched uranium abroad and shipping the spent fuel out, founders on Iran's insistence on enriching at home, which is also the path to a weapon. So the negotiations, in his view, go nowhere by design. Iran is willing to absorb the loss of Syria, part of Lebanon, maybe Yemen, and simply wait, because it has watched North Korea, Israel, and the India-Pakistan standoff and concluded that a bomb is the one thing that makes a regime untouchable.
Here is Alhajji's most contrarian line, and he dares you to check it:
"The perception is that the Trump administration is pro-oil, that they support the oil industry. But the reality, Trump hates the oil industry."
He points to thirty years of statements and Trump blaming the industry for old bankruptcies, and argues the Gulf energy deals are about getting the money, not loving the barrel. The practical conclusion is what matters for markets: the first-term production boom can't be repeated. A third of that three-million-barrel gain was just recovery from the 2015 price crash, not new growth. Shale was built on near-zero interest rates that no longer exist. The business model itself changed from "drill baby drill," where small operators proved reserves and flipped to bigger players, to "control baby control" after the majors bought everyone. And the killer is geology: shale's decline rates are now so steep that the US must add roughly 600,000 barrels a day of fresh production every month just to hold output flat. He is equally skeptical of the doom case, noting that the analysts now forecasting a two-to-three-million-barrel collapse are the same ones who wrongly predicted Russian output would crater under sanctions, when it fell barely 200,000.
The part of the conversation that left me more bearish than I started is the demand side. Global energy demand, Alhajji argues, is climbing past every official forecast, and currencies have nothing to do with it. Urbanization is the engine: when a family moves from Afghanistan or Central America into a US or European apartment, its energy consumption rises thirty to seventy fold, income or not. Stack AI data centers and the relentless growth of data use on top, and demand outruns everything solar and wind can add, which means the climate models that penciled in fossil-fuel replacement are simply wrong on the math. His conclusion is the headline most outlooks won't print: the demand for oil, gas, and coal is going to be higher than the forecasts say. The bottlenecks are physical, not political. The grid is too old to move the new power, and the world can't manufacture natural-gas turbines fast enough to build the baseload that AI requires, since wind, solar, and batteries can't carry it. The result is blackouts as a recurring feature, from Spain and Portugal to Texas and California to Kuwait, and a new kind of conflict over who gets the power when a data center stays lit and the city around it goes dark.
Underneath all of it, Alhajji's quiet alarm is about measurement. Staff losses have gutted the Energy Information Administration to the point that it canceled a scheduled International Energy Outlook, and for the first time in his career he no longer trusts the official numbers, on top of years of politicized reporting that dressed price disputes up as sanctions victories. Private firms like his are stepping into the gap, which is profitable and, as he puts it, a little sad. His fix is the most low-time-preference idea in the episode: align the clocks. Energy projects are built for thirty and forty years while politicians plan for the next election, so the single most useful reform would be to stop flip-flopping energy policy by executive order every four years and let capital plan on the horizon the assets actually live on. On Bitcoin he defers to me, but the thread he leaves is the telling one. Four years ago he said oil could not be settled in Bitcoin because the market wasn't liquid enough; Bitcoin was a two-hundred-billion-dollar asset then and it's a two-trillion-dollar one now, and the liquidity objection gets weaker every year. He even notes that Bitcoin miners, unlike AI data centers, can sell their power back during a shortage, the kind of grid flexibility that may end up mattering a great deal in the world he just described.
