“We have interests in building a new geopolitics so that we can change world governance,” Lula declared, while chatting with Zhao Leji in Beijing on Friday.

Predictably, Lula’s state visit to China was a highlight reel of quotables, some of which were tailor-made for de-dollarization narratives. On Thursday, after touring the New Development Bank headquarters in Shanghai, he advocated for BRICS coin.

“Who decided the dollar was the currency after the end of gold parity?” he wondered. Don’t bother offering any answers. Lula meant it as a rhetorical question. “Why can’t an institution like the BRICS bank have a currency to finance trade relations between Brazil and China, between Brazil and all the other BRICS countries?” he went on.

Maybe Langley should’ve put more resources into January’s Bolsonaro coup. (I’m just joking.) Military dictators are suboptimal, but the sight of a legendary leftist commiserating with a reincarnated Mao on the injustices of dollar-based global trade is wholly intolerable. (I’m just joking again.)

Lula’s BRICS currency remarks came as Dilma Rousseff was sworn in as chief of The New Development Bank. While attending her swearing-in ceremony, Lula played up a recent agreement with China to settle some bilateral trade in yuan.

It’s sometimes useful to extricate yourself from the political fray when considering the prospect of a coordinated move away from a dollar-dominated system of global trade, finance and commerce. The dollar is, famously, the most effective instrument of both soft and hard power the US has at its disposal, but at the end of the day, we’re talking about economic transactions. In our zeal to say something profound about geopolitics or to one-up each other in an absurd contest to demonstrate a mastery of global funding markets, we sometimes lose track of the underlying concerns about practicality. Put differently, what’s often lost in this debate is the big-picture utility of choosing one currency for settlement.

At a very basic level, this is about convenience. It goes all the way back to the creation of money. Money serves a variety of purposes, but one critical function is facilitating commerce by enabling specialization. From a stylized perspective, the constellation of EM currencies and other “soft” money isn’t that much different from the heterogeneous collection of goods on offer at a bazaar or a farmer’s market. Matches are possible but the system isn’t reliable, let alone efficient, because there’s no guarantee that, six months from now, the same match will be feasible (or if it is, on the same or similar terms).

Again, that’s all very stylized, but it speaks to the simple, apolitical reality bedeviling efforts to replace or supplant the dollar. Think of it another way: Accepting Bitcoin instead of dollars at any point during the former’s meteoric rise from obscurity would’ve made you exponentially wealthier over most holding periods up to November of 2021. But at every, single juncture, the vast majority of people, including all but the staunchest crypto adherents, would’ve at least hesitated before accepting a million dollars worth of Bitcoin on a thumb drive instead of a suitcase full of physical hundred dollar bills. The reason for the hesitation is simple. Even if you believed wholeheartedly in Bitcoin’s promise and were equally convinced that a dollar is every bit as intrinsically worthless as it most assuredly is, the odds that your million dollars worth of Bitcoin would be worth 50% less in dollar terms six months hence were far greater than the odds that the dollars would lose 25% of their broad purchasing power over the same six-month window. Further, because not everything is directly purchasable in Bitcoin, you’d need to take into consideration the conversion process, which would force you to recognize any mark-to-market losses on your Bitcoin if you wanted to purchase something for sale only in dollars.

Those are just a few “loose” thoughts on the near-term feasibility of broad de-dollarization for the purposes of trade settlement. Currencies are shared myths. The more people who share them, the stronger they are, and unfortunately for would-be dollar usurpers, there’s an asymmetry between what the US loses in terms of network strength by expelling countries from the club and what other countries gain by expelling themselves. This isn’t a setup that’s “fair.” If the US severs Russia’s access to the dollar-based financial system, there are some deleterious consequences for the US, mostly in the form of inflation (not a trivial concern, to be sure) and heightened distrust among nations who fear they too could lose access. But until there’s a viable alternative, those consequences are nowhere near as damaging to the dollar network as the consequences of quitting (or being expelled) are to “trouble”makers and sundry rebels, who are effectively left to conduct their affairs on a barter system — rubles for rupees, gas for guns and so on. That might work in some (many, even) cases, but it’s not ideal and, somewhat ironically given Lula’s allusions to the dollar as a superfluous trade impediment, it won’t always be efficient.

Panning back out to Lula’s broader agenda, he’s keen not just on expanding and deepening trade ties with Brazil’s largest export market, but also on convincing Xi to help reinvigorate Brazil’s manufacturing base, filling a void left by US companies including Ford. China will likely oblige, with the usual strings. Lula and Xi met for three hours on Friday, and oversaw the signing of more than a dozen agreements.

Lula is also intent on realizing longer-term ambitions for expanding Brazil’s influence in a multilateral world. He sees Xi as a potential partner in that effort, and the feeling is probably mutual. Lula’s decision to visit a Huawei plant in Shanghai was a flagrant affront to the US, although he certainly didn’t present it that way.

As for the war in Ukraine, Lula, who was in Washington just two months ago, exhorted the US to “stop encouraging war and start talking about peace.”