Victoria Nuland testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, January 26, 2023. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
US acting deputy secretary of state Victoria Nuland downplayed talks of de-dollarisation during a sit down interview with the Mail & Guardian this week.
Nuland is in the country leading a US delegation participating in the US-South Africa Working Group on African and Global Issues (WGAGI).
According to a statement from Washington, this is the third year Nuland has led the bi-lateral engagement. Her visit also entailed meetings with government leaders in the energy sector.
In a wide-ranging interview with the M&G, Nuland said that the US was a “strong believer” in the greenback, and its work for “global good”.
Talks of South Africa, the African continent and some emerging economies moving away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency has intensified with the Russian war on Ukraine.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, raised the matter during the finance summit in Paris last month.
Ramaphosa said that the move away from the dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency for global trade would be discussed at the Brics summit taking place in South Africa this month.
During a meeting of Brics foreign ministers in June, the bloc stated that its meeting underscored the importance of encouraging the use of local currencies in international trade and financial transactions between Brics as well as their trading partners.
Defending the dollar, Nuland said that it had been a balancer around the world.
“It’s not an easy thing to start something new in the financial realm. Leaders will obviously talk about it and they have a right to look at those things. I don’t think it’s as easy a path as some think it is from here to there,” she said.
Speaking at a Brics symposium in May, International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor said that moving away from the dollar was becoming an increasingly more common discussion.
She said the conversations were not about weakening the dollar, but rather about empowering other currencies.
“I have not seen it as a negative discussion, you know, anti-dollar. It’s about whether it is possible to develop a system in which other currencies may be able to be used for international trade,” she said.
Pandor conceded, however, that the move would not be easy.
With the expansion of Brics to include more emerging economies such as Egypt, Argentina, Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on the agenda, the summit is expected to result in further pressure to reassess the dollar’s dominance.
According to M&G contributing columnist Dr Imran Khalid, the failure, or reluctance, of the West to reform global governance in a way that grants emerging economies, such as China, greater influence has only compounded grievances.
Khalid said Brics nations seek a currency that ensures accessibility and equitable treatment in global trade, aiming to address the US dollar’s role as a tool for American hegemony, which they believe creates economic instability and hampers global recovery.
Nuland also came to the defence of the US and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ramaphosa has over the years relayed how rich countries from the northern hemisphere bought all of the Covid vaccines, hogging them to the detriment of the global south.
During the Paris finance summit, Ramaphosa said he recognised efforts by the US to supply vaccines, “but there have been times when we felt like we were beggars”.
“We felt like we were begging and at times it felt like there would just be droppings from the table. Let me tell you, [that was] something that generated a lot of resentment. We resented that, and it got worse when we said we want to manufacture our own vaccines.
“And when we went to the World Trade Organisation, there was a lot of resistance, enormous resistance,” Ramaphosa told French president Emmanuel Macron.
But Nuland said the US was “massively generous” in supplying US-manufactured vaccines to South Africa and other countries.
“In 2021 I was here and we were already on our second or third shipment. More importantly, working with countries including South Africa to develop your own vaccine capability, vaccine supply chain, because we understood that none of us was resilient against the pandemic. We were strong supporters of indigenous vaccine capability and the development of the chain that goes with that on the continent,” she said.
“We kept saying: ‘What is more important? Life or profits by your big pharmaceutical companies?’ That too, I must tell you, generated and deepened the disappointment and resentment on our part, because we felt like life in the northern hemisphere is much more important than life in the global south.”
