Politicians and policy makers in the US often talk a big game when it comes to the need for a strong dollar.  But as Willem Buiter, Chief Economist of Citigroup, and Ebrahim Rahbari, an economist for Citigroup, write at VoxEU, "US strong-dollar rhetoric has contrasted sharply with a weak dollar reality."  Buiter and Rahbari argue that current policy will keep the dollar relatively weak against other currencies.  But they also see no viable alternative to the dollar as the key currency in global business. 

Stepping away from the rhetoric about the dollar, Buiter and Rahbari remind us of some of the reasons policymakers may be okay with the dollar not getting to strong too quickly:

[A] low actual dollar exchange rate may be seen as a net benefit for the US, because, in the presence of nominal rigidities, a depreciation of the nominal dollar exchange rate implies a real depreciation and therefore an increase in the international competitiveness of the US tradables sectors. The US is quite an open economy today, with the ratio of trade (the sum of imports and exports) to GDP at around 30%, comparable to Japan (Figure 3). Net exports have also played a significant part in the slowly solidifying recent cyclical recovery in the US, though it is, of course, true that many factors affect the evolution of net exports besides the level of the (nominal or real) exchange rate.

Read The ‘strong dollar’ policy of the US: Alice-in-Wonderland semantics vs. economic reality here.