Historically the US would go to war or even coup countries to force them to trade with the US, it has spent a very long time building up its dollar hegemony. If it suddenly switches to cutting off trade with its largest trading partners, that will basically disappear overnight. It is already disappearing gradually because of US’s obsessive use of sanctions has created a whole bloc of countries that have no choice but to figure out how to bypass the US dollar. I wouldn’t even consider the US threatening to cut trade ties all its largest trading partners as “bullying,” it really reflects how much weaker the US has become, because in the past it would just use force to enforce its hegemony over global trade, now it seems too weak to it is just threatening to throw a temper tantrum and threatening to pull out of the global market instead, despite this being something that will ultimately cause whatever is left of US hegemony to collapse overnight. I would bet a lot of money the US would not actually do this, Trump is just bluffing, because I’m sure he’s surrounded by people who actually do care about maintaining US control.
This problem presupposes metaphysical realism, so you have to be a metaphysical realist to take the problem seriously. Metaphysical realism is a particular kind of indirect realism whereby you posit that everything we observe is in some sense not real, sometimes likened to a kind of “illusion” created by the mammalian brain (I’ve also seen people describe it as an “internal simulation”), called “consciousness” or sometimes “subjective experience” with the adjective “subjective” used to make it clear it is being interpreted as something unique to conscious subjects and not ontologically real.
If everything we observe is in some sense not reality, then “true” reality must by definition be independent of what we observe. If this is the case, then it opens up a whole bunch of confusing philosophical problems, as it would logically mean the entire universe is invisible/unobservable/nonexperiential, except in the precise configuration of matter in the human brain which somehow “gives rise to” this property of visibility/observability/experience. It seems difficult to explain this without just presupposing this property arbitrarily attaches itself to brains in a particular configuration, i.e. to treat it as strongly emergent, which is effectively just dualism, indeed the founder of the “hard problem of consciousness” is a self-described dualist.
This philosophical problem does not exist in direct realist schools of philosophy, however, such as Jocelyn Benoist’s contextual realism, Carlo Rovelli’s weak realism, or in Alexander Bogdanov’s empiriomonism. It is solely a philosophical problem for metaphysical realists, because they begin by positing that there exists some fundamental gap between what we observe and “true” reality, then later have to figure out how to mend the gap. Direct realist philosophies never posit this gap in the first place and treat reality as precisely equivalent to what we observe it to be, so it simply does not posit the existence of “consciousness” and it would seem odd in a direct realist standpoint to even call experience “subjective.”
The “hard problem” and the “mind-body problem” are the main reasons I consider myself a direct realist. I find that it is a completely insoluble contradiction at the heart of metaphysical realism, I don’t think it even can be solved because you cannot posit a fundamental gap and then mend the gap later without contradicting yourself. There has to be no gap from the get-go. I see these “problems” as not things to be “solved,” but just a proof-by-contradiction that metaphysical realism is incorrect. All the arguments against direct realism, on the other hand, are very weak and people who espouse them don’t seem to give them much thought.