Is the global economy starting to break into competing blocs?

I’ve been thinking about something that doesn’t get talked about much in everyday terms, but seems like it could have pretty big consequences. For decades, the global economy more or less ran on a shared set of rules. These included trade agreements, institutions, and norms that kept countries from constantly using tariffs, sanctions, and economic pressure against each other. It wasn’t perfect, but it created a kind of stability that businesses and countries could plan around.

Lately, it feels like that system is starting to fray. The U.S. has been more willing to act unilaterally on trade, other countries are responding in kind, and supply chains are being reorganized less around efficiency and more around political alignment. You can see it in things like domestic manufacturing pushes, export controls, and the growing sense that countries are hedging against each other rather than cooperating. Some of that probably makes sense from a security standpoint, but it also seems like it could lead to a more fragmented and less stable global economy over time.

How real is this shift? Are we moving toward a world where economic competition is organized into blocs, or is this just a temporary adjustment? And if things are changing, where’s the line between healthy resilience and outright fragmentation? 

I’ve been trying to pull these pieces into a more coherent way of thinking about how the global system is shifting, but I’m not sure yet where that leads. I am curious how others are interpreting it.