Daniel McDowell

Daniel McDowell is an American political scientist whose Bucking the Buck (2023) examines whether exposure to United States financial sanctions encourages governments to reduce their reliance on the dollar. As at 29 July 2026, Syracuse University identifies him as a professor of international affairs at the Maxwell School. His findings support a conditional backlash argument, not a claim that sanctions have displaced the dollar globally.

The argument

Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar argues that sanctions attach political risk to an otherwise superior currency. For most users the dollar's liquidity and network advantages dominate, but for states that are sanctioned or plausibly sanctionable, the calculus shifts: holding dollar assets and clearing through US-exposed channels becomes a strategic vulnerability. McDowell traces the resulting behaviour across cases including Russia, which shifted reserves into gold and renminbi and built SPFS messaging after 2014, Turkey, Venezuela, and Iran: reserve diversification, local-currency trade settlement, alternative payment rails such as CIPS, and gold accumulation. The response is insurance, not exit; the dollar's centrality survives, but a parallel infrastructure grows at the margin, and each new sanctions campaign recruits users to it. His earlier book, Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? The United States, the IMF, and the International Lender of Last Resort (2017), examined the other face of dollar power, the ability to lend support as well as deny access.

Significance

McDowell's evidence disciplines both sides of a contested question. It does not show an imminent dethroning of the dollar, but it identifies measurable diversification and infrastructure-building among states exposed to sanctions risk. The scale and cumulative effect of that Weaponisation backlash vary by country and indicator. The work is an important source for the De-dollarisation as backlash dynamic and the self-undermining arsenal problem, the concern that repeated use of dollar chokepoints can erode their future value, which bears directly on campaign sustainability in the Economic Kill Chain.

See also

De-dollarisation as backlash dynamic · Weaponisation backlash · Dollar hegemony and exorbitant privilege · Reserve diversification (gold accumulation) · CIPS · SPFS · Agathe Demarais

Sources

• Daniel McDowell, Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), doi:10.1093/oso/9780197679876.001.0001.
• Daniel McDowell, Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? The United States, the IMF, and the International Lender of Last Resort (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Syracuse University, Maxwell School, "Daniel McDowell", profile current to 29 July 2026.
• International Monetary Fund, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves, current data source for reserve shares.