If friends are the family you choose, trading partners are the geographical neighbors you… choose might not always be the right word, but there’s certainly more flexibility in the topology of trade links than in the distances of geography.
So how does the world look like if we ignore physical distance and focus only on who’s whose main trading partner (let’s say during 2020, poking quickly at the UN International Trade Database)? How do countries re-arrange themselves in new continents of flowing services and goods? The answer will not surprise you at all:
There are three obvious spheres of trade dominance: the United States’, Germany’s, and China’s, with the United Kingdom straddling the first two (for long?). Perhaps the most interesting fact is the trade irrelevance of the Monroe Doctrine; by and far, the US is no longer America’s favorite trading partner in most places further South than Ecuador, and in the rest of the world mostly only where geopolitics play a role. With some exaggeration — lack of a link in this graph doesn’t mean lack of trade, and certainly not lack of cultural and political influence or even dominance — the Southern Hemisphere’s trade is (slightly) more oriented towards China than otherwise, and same for Eurasia sans Europe, with the rest more or less split by the Atlantic (with the exceptions already mentioned).
The main caveat to this, and, more than a caveat it’s a necessary analytical context, is that GDP per capita is far from uniform across these groups (in constant terms, China’s is around a fourth of the United States’, and the latter is far from the world leader at this) and that, to a very large degree, these trade relationships have been deliberately neglected by the US and Germany’s blocks; large developed countries have, for historical and political reasons, strongly protected local agricultural sectors, which means they are less interested in trading with foreign primary producers than they would otherwise be. This isn’t “China is taking over the world.”
It is, however, “China’s trading heavily with pretty much everybody not in the United States and Germany’s very narrowly defined backyards,” and, if not news by now, it’s still a new development in world history.