what if the whole structure of financial operations starts to change?
Contrary to that point are things like BRICS, the Russia/China pipelines, loads of black-market operations, other enemies of the US coming onboard with Russia, and essentially the people getting fed up with the sanctions and forcing their leaders to get rid of them.
Right now, Russia and China are developing a form of SWIFT to operate between these two countries -
https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russia-and-china-to-develop-swift-avoiding-international-financial-systems.html/. And there are others. Turns out that the US is shutting down its own worldwide financial operations by trying to maintain is control.
None of this will unfold in a fast fashion for the US and Nato countries. But it will unfold fast for Russia and other major countries (countries who realize that they are being cut off from Russian benefits by the sanctions).
I have heard about russia developing alternatives to the SWIFT banking network since around 2012.
Russia searching for SWIFT alternatives has to be near to a 10 year old Putin quest. Let me see if I can find references for it. Here:
SPFSSPFS (Russian: Cиcтeмa пepeдaчи финaнcoвыx cooбщeний (CПФC), romanized: Sistema peredachi finansovykh soobscheniy, lit. 'System for Transfer of Financial Messages') is a Russian equivalent of the SWIFT financial transfer system, developed by the Central Bank of Russia.[1]
The system has been in development since 2014, when the United States government threatened to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT system.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPFS The SWIFT alternative is developed and operated by russia's central bank since 2014 ^.
Peter Zeihan claims russia's central bank has been blocked internationally. Which has the potential to disconnect the SWIFT alternative they operate and manage.
Maybe russia can find workarounds and fixes for attempts to destabilize their alt network. Maybe they cannot.
One thing I like about Zeihan's commentary is he provides hard analysis for his claims, such as russian bonds potentially defaulting in april of 2023.
The whole thing depends on communications. The infrastructure is there for all countries to communicate over the Internet, if the leaders don't pull the plug on each other. And Russian and Chinese programmers, for example, are very capable. And when you consider things like
IPFS, the info can't be taken off the Internet without taking the whole Internet down.
As for Zeihan's commentaries, he is talking from the standpoint of the already-built, standard system that we are familiar with. For example. In America we have a system of farms that sell product to middlemen who get that product through a trucking system, and then refine it for use in stores. But more and more there are what we call preppers, who are not depending on the American agricultural system except in small ways... and some of them not at all.
Zeihan might say that these preppers are dying or failing, simply because they are outside the standard system. But it turns out that they aren't dying at all. In fact, most of them are far healthier than average customers of the system. If Zeihan wants to play within the system, this doesn't mean that those outside the system don't have a system of their own, even though it isn't popular in the media.