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Here’s Bannon’s thesis in my summation:

The international SWIFT system (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) is settled in US Federal Reserve Dollars. I say Federal Reserve Dollars because the US Dollar should not be relegated to monopoly money. If I was intending to be less serious, there would be mention of “US Monopoly Money” which is accurate but distracts.

All currencies are worthless (no one in their right mind is going to give you gold for lira), including Federal Reserve Notes but these latter are what settle transactions in the energy sector. That makes them special (Petro-dollar).

Just Because we can buy milk, bread, eggs, cheese, etc. in $$$, doesn’t make the Federal Reserve Notes “valuable”, rather they are “acceptable” as our society accepts them as base exchange currency units.

If suddenly we find ourselves in grocery stores or gas stations and our payment cards fail to work, then we will be shocked, confused, then angry. We are going to protest and if we’re not taken seriously, we are going to find another means of exchange. Our payment cards will end up as worthless plastic.

So it is with SWIFT. The Europeans are reluctantly dependent on Russian natural gas (NG). Note in passing that the US has the biggest reserves of oil and NG in the world, dwarfing Saudi Arabia by at least a factor of 10.

Taking down SWIFT from purchasing Russian NG would be analogous to you not able to use your payment card at the gas pump. You’re going to find something else to use.

A little history:

Decades ago and up until Trump was elected in 2016, the US was mercilessly dependent on OPEC oil pricing, primarily set by Saudi Arabia.

The oil price spikes set in motion American Wildcatters (God bless them) who developed technology in hydraulic fracturing (”fracking”) and over the course of a couple of decades put America as the number one producer in oil and gas.

When frackers would install environmentally safe drilled sleeves to inject chems to liquefy the shale, the oil would rush under pressure to the surface, the pressure source is NG.

So much NG would come out that frackers would flare it off as clean waste. More American NG was burned off at the drill pumps than was used in Europe. American truckers brought refrigerated trucks to liquefy the NG to form liquefied NG or LNG. LNG takes up 1/600th the volume of NG. LNG can be transported by tanker trucks or ships. Then new NG pipeline networks started to form, controlled by command centers in Cushing, OK, directed to US cities and towns and also ports for export.

Trump gave the LNG industry green lights to supply not only the US but also Europe. The US LNG imports, especially into Rotterdam, would absolutely crush Russian dominance.

But the Biden camp has quashed the American oil and gas export industry. So there is no export of American NG to Europe or anywhere else.

There’s a lot more to this, but you get the idea why taking down SWIFT would cause Euros to go after other means of exchange to get vital NG supplies. They can use SWIFT for anyone else but Putin’s Russia. But there ain’t no other big NG source now. So SWIFT and its Petro-dollar underpinnings are useless.

Euros can’t get NG from the US because of Biden. They can’t get Russian NG using SWIFT (Petro-dollar) if SWIFT is restricted. The world’s reserve currency takes a huge hit. That’s essentially what Bannon is saying.