OREANDA-NEWS. Acting Assistant Deputy Head of the US National Nuclear Safety Administration David Hoagland said that financial restrictive measures imposed by Washington against other states may lose their effectiveness over time.

According to him, the effectiveness of financial sanctions is primarily connected with the fact that more than 90 % of all transactions in the world somehow involve the American financial system.

“…We use it to punish everything from hacking to using weapons of mass destruction. And our opponents really don’t like it,” the official said at a nuclear deterrence conference in Washington. “There is a very real risk that the tool that we have been increasingly using to influence the behavior of our opponents and sometimes even friends may not be as effective as before, after five or twenty years,” he added.

Hoagland stated that the US authorities draw such a conclusion on the basis of the fact that the countries under sanctions are trying to get out of the sphere of influence of the dollar. According to him, in 2014 2 % of trade transactions between Russia and China was carried out in yuan, and in 2017 this figure grew to 9 %; as for Russian roubles, an increase from 9 % to 15 % was recorded.