Two days after a U.S. drone assassinated Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani outside the Baghdad International Airport, the Iraqi parliament approved a nonbinding resolution to expel the American military from its country. It was not Iraq’s first effort at eviction: Several times in the past few years, the Baghdad government has requested that U.S. forces leave. The State Department, though, refused to accept the parliament’s decision, and President Trump threatened to sanction Iraq over the vote. “We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, traveling back to Washington from his Mar-a-Lago estate. “It cost billions of dollars to build. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.”

This was a Trumpian tack, to be sure, but also a consummately American one. To keep Iraq amenable to a U.S. presence, the State Department turned to the United States’ “dollar power”—its vast control over the supply and distribution of the dollar, the global reserve currency—and threatened to cut off Iraq’s access to its Federal Reserve account, which would effectively paralyze the government’s ability to provide basic services. Faced with this threat, which according to one Baghdad official “would mean collapse for Iraq,” Iraqis have backed away from their call to banish U.S. troops. The American military looks set to remain in the country indefinitely.

Ending the U.S.’s “endless wars” has become common sense within the Democratic Party. From activists on the street to presidential candidates on the debate stage, a new consensus has emerged that the nation must shrink its military budget and restrain the executive branch’s power to launch unwinnable foreign conflicts. In an essay for The Atlantic on Monday, in which she promised to seek congressional authorization for the use force if she becomes president, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote that “having a strong military means using it with the utmost responsibility,” adding that “we must reassess our global posture to ensure that U.S. forces are engaged in realistic missions, and that the risks and costs of military deployments must be appropriately limited.”

But in its laser focus on military restraint, the present debate about endless war largely overlooks the financial architecture of U.S. empire. As the Iraq case illustrates, the dollar is a linchpin of U.S. military dominance, motivating and enabling its expansion around the world. To curb America’s imperial adventurism—and the president’s personal ability to engage in it unilaterally—it is essential not only to draw down the nation’s enormous global military presence but to reduce the dollar’s centrality to international trade and finance.

The United States has a long tradition of leveraging its economic power to advance its foreign policy agenda. In the early twentieth century, U.S.-imposed “dollar diplomacy” traded Latin American sovereignty for American capital and control over local customs houses. President William Howard Taft, who initiated dollar diplomacy, claimed that his strategy “substitut[ed] dollars for bullets.” According to Taft, this substitution would both advance American interests and reduce violent conflict the world over.