People have forgotten Europe also tried to separate from the US 16 years ago, when Putin said Russia would join the Eurozone, which would have married Russian energy with German engineering, a combo t...
The petrodollar architecture requires energy to flow through dollar-denominated channels. Russian gas plus German manufacturing would have been the first major bloc that didn't need that — not threatening, just financially independent. Any arrangement that doesn't recycle surpluses through US Treasuries is structurally intolerable to the system.