I've always sort-of-joked[1] about a "Blood Standard": your status as reserve currency is proportional to the percentage of the world population your nation can murder in 12 months.

Puts a hard floor on nations with strategic nuclear deterrents - they can never fall below a fairly high threshold, no matter how much of a "Security State Zombie" their national economies have become.

[1] I'm not 100% sure it's all me joking anymore.

> In other words electric power now equates to global power.

In living memory, has this not been the case? Oil's use as an energy source is far more meaningful than its material use.

Part of why I always questioned why calling a country a "gas station" was supposed to be insulting. Yea, that's the main ingredient of being a world power.

The more interconnected the grid gets, the more true this becomes.