June 25, 2026. Two handshakes, opposite sides of the world, one story. In Baghdad, Iraq's new central bank governor, Nizar Nasser Hussein, sat down with the senior US diplomat in the country. In Washington, the same day, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent named the dollar as the door every sanctioned nation has to walk back through.

Bessent read out the whole queue on camera. Venezuela is coming back to invoice in dollars. Iran will do the same. Russia, he said, will want back in once the war in Ukraine ends. For years the loudest story in finance was that the world was leaving the dollar. Wednesday the Treasury Secretary said the opposite: the dollar is not being abandoned, it is being rebuilt, by pulling the sanctioned back in one at a time and charging each of them to return.

Iraq is the furthest along that line. It has spent more than 3 years rebuilding its dollar-clearing under American supervision, and its central bank now says the restricted banks are in the final stages of reintegration. Iraqi-press channels report the file to delete the three zeros from the dinar is live and moving, and a new 25 dinar note has already been shown. The bank denies it, on schedule.

So Baghdad is cleaning house in public. The Jumaili oil-ministry corruption case has gone from $10 million to more than $106 million, with a former provincial governor now arrested and cash dug four metres out of the ground. On June 24 the customs authority switched its ASYCUDA verification live across all 22 federal border crossings, with July 10 the hard cutoff. Clean books and traceable trade are the price of the seat.

The catch is oil. West Texas crude slid to $69 as the Strait of Hormuz reopened, with the UN and Oman opening two lanes to clear the backlog and more than 11,000 stranded seafarers. Iraq gets its volume back and watches the value fall. The waterway charges no toll. The dollar does.

Hold a dinar today and you are betting on Iraq's place at the front of that queue. On Wednesday, that line looked shorter than it has ever looked.