Trust in the US is eroding. The question isn’t if the dollar will lose supremacy – it’s when

The Brics group of countries has increasingly moved to conduct bilateral trade in national currencies, bypassing the need for US dollars. Photograph: Yonhap/EPA

For more than eight decades, the US dollar has reigned supreme as the world’s reserve currency – a position cemented at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and reinforced by America’s postwar industrial power and military dominance.

Today, that supremacy is facing growing resistance from multiple directions – from African revolutionary movements to economic recalibrations in Europe, and from the counterbalance efforts of Brics nations to the geopolitical entanglements of Ukraine and Israel.