You may not have grown up playing with an Erector Set, but perhaps you had another building kit where, with patience and perhaps some parental assistance, you could bolt plastic rods together into colossal structures. The most important pieces were some of the smallest: the connectors. (They were also the quickest to disappear under the rug or into the vacuum.) Without those, you were just another frustrated mini starchitect.

We’d like to introduce you to a real-life set of connectors. That’s our name for a group of countries emerging as important links in a global economy that’s fragmenting into rival blocs. Listen to the rhetoric coming out of Washington and Beijing today, and you’ll hear a lot of “either you’re with us or against us” kind of talk. But not everyone is picking sides.