As the Cold War wound down almost four decades ago, a top adviser to the reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, warned the West that “we are going to do the most terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.”

In the celebrations of the triumph of Western liberal democracy, of free trade and open societies, few considered how disorienting the end of a binary world of good and evil would be.

But when the spread of democracy in newly freed societies looked more like the spread of divisive global capitalism, when social fracture grew and shared truth died, when hope collapsed in the communities technology left behind, a yearning for the certainties of the providential authoritarian leader set in.

“In the absence of a shared reality, or shared facts, or a shared threat, reason had no weight beside emotion,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French political scientist. “And so a dislocated world of danger has produced a hunger for the strongman.”

A different Russia, briefly imagined as a partner of the West, eventually became an enemy once more. But by the time it invaded Ukraine in 2022, disillusionment with Western liberalism had gone so far that President Vladimir V. Putin’s tirades against the supposed decadence of the West enjoyed wide support among far-right nationalist movements across Europe, in the United States and elsewhere. Western allies stood firm in defense of Ukrainian democracy, but even that commitment is wobbling.

The curious resurrection and resounding victory of Donald J. Trump amounted to the apotheosis of a long-gathering revolt against the established order. No warning of the fragility of democracy or freedom, no allusion to 20th-century cataclysm or Mr. Trump’s attraction to dictators, could hold back the tide.

If Russia was humiliated by the collapse of its communist imperium, as Mr. Putin has long asserted, it now reveled in the victory of Mr. Trump, who is dismissive of climate change, big on male virility and who argues, like Mr. Putin, that the West of networked elites is the place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of gender go to die.

More dangers abound than when Mr. Trump won in 2016. In a world of rival powers where the post-1945 order seems largely dead, wars rage in Europe and the Middle East. They spread and efforts to end them have proved ineffectual.

North Korea, a nuclear power whose troops now bolster Russian forces against Ukraine, is drawn in. Iran’s long conflict through surrogates with Israel escalates into direct exchanges of missiles. Loose talk of nuclear war resurfaces as a paralyzed United Nations Security Council looks on. “The Sleepwalkers” was the title of Christopher Clark’s book on the onset of World War I. They appear to many to be afoot once more.

To this mire will now be added the chaotic, impulsive, high-risk approach to foreign policy described with near unanimity by Mr. Trump’s top aides during his first term, as well as his expressed contempt for NATO and the European Union, anchors of postwar Western security and stability, and his threats of confrontation with China in the form of punishing tariffs. A turbulent world and a turbulent personality make for a dangerous mix.

During the election campaign, Mr. Trump made much of the fact that the European and Middle Eastern wars erupted after his first presidency and tried to portray Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, as the warmonger. His adviser Stephen Miller warned on X, that a Harris victory would mean “We invade a dozen countries. Boys in Michigan are drafted to fight boys in the Middle East. Millions die.”

These were totally unfounded claims. But many Americans believe that Mr. Trump, at heart a businessman for whom foreign policy is merely a matter of transactional resolve, will usher in an era of prosperity incompatible with the turbulence of war. During his first term, he forged the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab states.

Europe, however, is worried. Thomas Bagger, the State Secretary of the German Federal Foreign Office, said that “the shock is more profound because this time the election of Trump is not an accident but a clear expression of what America is and what it wants.”

Speaking as Germany’s coalition government collapsed and uncertainty loomed before a general election next year, he added that Mr. Trump’s victory was particularly troubling because “the German Federal Republic is a creation of the United States of America, the fruit of postwar enlightened American policy.”

Mr. Trump said this year that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO members not meeting the alliance’s targets for spending on defense, and has suggested he would cut back on critical American support for Ukraine.

For the international system, a Russian victory in Ukraine would affirm a principle of might over right, and for Europe it would pose a direct threat.

Europe is more divided and has moved rightward over the past eight years. This was aptly symbolized by a meeting of European leaders Thursday in Budapest, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, in a message on X, greeted Mr. Trump’s re-election as a “much needed victory for the world.”

Mr. Orban’s illiberal model, which has severely curtailed press freedom and the independence of the judiciary, has been hailed in Mr. Trump’s entourage as a possible template. Mr. Trump has called Mr. Orban a “fantastic” leader.

The assembled European leaders, prodded by President Emmanuel Macron of France, agreed the continent should take more responsibility for its defense given the unpredictability of Mr. Trump’s America. But they were divided on sustained support for Ukraine, which Mr. Orban opposes.

“There is no possible good outcome in Ukraine today,” said Ms. Bacharan, the French political scientist. “Trump wants the war over and, with Putin, will do whatever it takes.”

With nationalist and anti-immigrant political currents strong throughout the continent, Mr. Trump will have more levers than during his first term with which to undermine the 27-nation European Union. The possibility that Europe will splinter, with each nation cutting its own deals with Washington, appears real.

“As a nation we don’t have a way to deal with a world where every country is only looking out for itself,” Mr. Bagger said of Germany. “We nurtured the idea of an international community because it was the only post-Nazi way to think of ourselves. So where we turn in Trump’s world is unclear.”

Many nations are asking themselves similar questions. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political philosopher, wrote in 1930 of a world in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Mr. Trump could be returning to power in another such moment. He is not responsible for the breakdown of the Western-dominated postwar order or the diminishing magnetism of democracy for some as compared to China’s autocratic growth model, but he will have to deal with the consequences.

The BRICS group of emerging market nations is now a powerful counterweight to the West, as illustrated at its meeting last month, hosted by Mr. Putin. Entrenched Russian and Chinese hostility toward the United States will complicate Mr. Trump’s every foreign policy endeavor.

India, at once a BRIC member with close ties to Russia and a close friend of the United States, enjoyed good relations with Mr. Trump during his first term. Jawed Ashraf, the Indian ambassador to France, said he expected that to continue.

But Mr. Ashraf added: “We are in a state of the world where people are seeking new answers. There’s a lack of belief in the future. Economic models unable to deliver, unfettered social media, and global volatility lead to taking it out on immigrants and questioning of democratic systems.”

Mr. Trump’s victory was part of this wider phenomenon. In societies atomized by the overwhelming pace of technological change, and marked by growing inequality, Mr. Trump had simple answers that resonated.

Those answers were the border and the pocketbook, the former too porous and the latter too empty. He would fix both.

“It was the fight-fight-fight backlash,” said Pascal Bruckner, a French author and philosopher, alluding to Mr. Trump’s words after he narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July. “No more complex diagnosis, no more delicate decisions.”

“God spared my life for a reason,” Mr. Trump said at his victory speech early Wednesday. The possibility of a sense of divine mission, backed by a clear electoral mandate, could make the likelihood of balanced policy more remote.

Mr. Trump has not moderated in almost a decade since embarking on his first presidential campaign. “People want strength,” he said then. “We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty,” he said. He got the blood up. Many dismissed him as a buffoon. But with his uncanny political antennae, attuned to humanity’s fears and resentments, he was onto something.

China was rising; American power ebbing; Afghanistan and Iraq were graveyards of American glory; millions of struggling Americans felt forgotten or invisible; and the establishment had not understood the fact-lite theater of the contemporary world.

It was the perfect storm for rabble-rousing. Far from an anomaly, Mr. Trump now looks like an inevitability, the answer, not once but twice, to the shattering of hopes for liberal democracy that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, has been at odds with his fellow European Union leaders for years over his right-wing nationalist stance on immigration, minority rights, the rule of law, media freedoms and other issues. He would not get in line with his counterparts’ views on aiding Ukraine and has openly sympathized with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

But while E.U. officials criticized his self-styled “illiberal democracy,” other strongman leaders like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey embraced him — and none more than Donald J. Trump, who welcomed him to the White House in 2019 and has remained close, calling him “fantastic” earlier this year.

A look at Mr. Orban’s rise to power shows how he became a darling to conservatives and right-wing politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.

Who is Orban?

When Mr. Orban, 61, first became prime minister in 1998, he was a rarity among Eastern European leaders for having never been part of a Soviet-era regime. At the time, Mr. Orban was an advocate of liberal democracy.

As a young man, he attended Oxford University — courtesy of a scholarship funded by George Soros — and studied how young democracies could make the transition from authoritarianism. In Hungary, in 1988, he became a founding member of the Federation of Young Democrats, known as Fidesz, which was dedicated to fighting communism. Even after it lost power to the Hungarian Socialist Party in 2002, Mr. Orban maintained control of the party, which still dominates Hungary’s political arena.

Mr. Orban was ousted as prime minister in 2002, and lost a re-election bid in 2006. But, in 2010, playing the financial crisis to his advantage, he returned to power in a landslide win and has held on ever since.

He and his party have used their hefty majority to enact a more conservative constitution. He stacked the judiciary with more-amenable judges, and also whittled away at some checks and balances that post-Cold War Hungarian leaders had put in place to stave off authoritarianism.

Among them, he changed the electoral rules to better suit his party, throttled the free press and cracked down on nonprofit organizations, including the Open Society Foundations. That nonprofit was founded by Mr. Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary and whom Mr. Orban has accused of seeking to undermine Hungary’s sovereignty.

With the state apparatus rebuilt in his favor, Mr. Orban has continued to win elections, lending an air of legitimacy to what he calls the “illiberal state,” in which Mr. Orban rules like an elected autocrat.

Why Does He Vex the European Union?

For more than a decade, the European Union, which Hungary joined in 2004, has criticized what it calls an erosion of democratic values under Mr. Orban’s rule. For his part, he has accused the E.U. of meddling in his country’s internal affairs with “European diktats.” He has also criticized the E.U. for promoting liberal values on issues such as gender and race that go against the traditional, conservative values he has entrenched in Hungary’s “Christian democracy.”

The bloc’s executive, the European Commission, has opened numerous disciplinary procedures against Hungary and blocked the transfer of billions of euros in E.U. funds in an attempt to change its behavior, to limited effect.

Hungary has positioned itself as a critic from within. Mr. Orban has fiercely differed with the bloc’s stance on migration, erecting a fence in 2015 along his country’s border with Serbia, patrolled by sometimes brutal security forces. (Austria, Italy, Slovakia and other countries have since emulated his tough stance.)

More recently, Mr. Orban has dug in his heels on Europe’s response to the war in Ukraine. He has called his fellow E.U. leaders “warmongers” for supporting Kyiv. As president of the Council of the European Union, an organizational role that rotates every six months, he visited Mr. Putin in July, riling many of his counterparts.

He has also positioned himself as a messenger between Mr. Trump and Europe, delivering his plan for a swift end to the war, after visiting the then-Republican candidate at his home in Mar-a-Lago in July.

A Conservative Darling

The Hungarian prime minister may be maligned elsewhere, but he is respected by the U.S. president-elect. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban,” Mr. Trump said early this year.

At the sole presidential campaign debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump described Mr. Orban as “one of the most respected men,” adding: “They call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart.”

American conservatives have also embraced Mr. Orban’s calls to reshape government institutions in accordance with his ideology and fight against secularism. He has been feted at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. Conservative U.S. media personality Tucker Carlson has expressed great admiration for Mr. Orban, interviewing him in Budapest and in the United States and taking a helicopter ride to inspect Hungary’s border fence.

This week, the 2024 U.S. election results had not yet been fully tallied when Mr. Trump and Mr. Orban were on the phone. “Mar-a-Lago calling,” Mr. Orban posted on social media on Wednesday night, announcing his first call with the freshly re-elected Mr. Trump. “We have big plans for the future!”

A soccer game between Dutch and Israeli teams in Amsterdam on Thursday night led to dozens of arrests, in what officials in Israel and the Netherlands described as antisemitic attacks on the fans of the Israeli team.

As of Friday, many details of what happened on Thursday, including the identities and affiliations of those involved in the attacks on fans, are still unclear.

What happened in Amsterdam?

Dutch officials said that attackers had assaulted Israelis, and the Israeli Embassy in the Netherlands said that some victims had been kicked or beaten.

The attacks unfolded over several hours in multiple locations, with many taking place in the hours after the game ended.

Officials said that 62 people had been arrested in connection with the violence and that most had been later released. El Al, an Israeli airline, sent planes to transport Israeli citizens back to Israel.

How many people were hurt?

The total injury count is unclear. Five Israelis were hospitalized with injuries but were later discharged. The police said 20 to 30 people had sustained light injuries.

Who attacked the Israeli fans?

As of Friday, the identities of the attackers remained unclear. The police are investigating whether the attacks were coordinated.

Who are the teams involved?

The clashes followed a Europa League match between rival football teams, Maccabi Tel Aviv of Israel and Ajax of the Netherlands.

The two teams maintain friendly relations. The game itself went smoothly, with Ajax winning easily, 5-0.

After the clashes, Maccabi called for its fans to quickly return to Israel.

What happened before the game?

Street disturbances began Wednesday night, a full day before the match, after Maccabi fans began arriving in Amsterdam.

The authorities in Amsterdam said supporters of Maccabi had taken down a Palestinian flag from a building. A video posted to social media and verified by The New York Times shows men removing a Palestinian flag while others nearby shouted anti-Arab chants. One man is heard saying in Hebrew, “The people of Israel live,” while others shout anti-Palestinian chants using expletives.

The police said one taxi had been destroyed and a Palestinian flag burned in the center of town; 10 people were arrested, mostly on charges of disrupting public order.

Late Wednesday night, the police intervened to prevent a potential confrontation between several hundred Maccabi fans inside a casino and a group — including taxi drivers — that the authorities said had gathered after a social media call to “mobilize.”

On Thursday, at another square called Anton de Komplein, which is near the stadium, people protesting the arrival of Maccabi Tel Aviv clashed with the police, leading to dozens of arrests.

Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, had prohibited the protest from happening at the stadium.

What happened after the game?

The Israeli Embassy in the Netherlands said that hundreds of Maccabi fans in Amsterdam had been attacked after the game as they made their way back to their hotels.

“Mobs chanted anti-Israel slogans and proudly shared videos of their violent acts on social media — kicking, beating, even running over Israeli citizens,” the embassy said on social media.

Israel warned its citizens in Amsterdam to avoid wearing Israeli or Jewish symbols, to avoid being in public and to fly back to Israel as soon as possible.

Claire Moses contributed reporting.

For months, Hungary’s media apparatus pumped out stories lionizing Donald J. Trump and deriding Kamala Harris, described in one headline as “extremely unpleasant.”

In October, the country’s leader vowed to “open several bottles of Champagne if Trump is back.” And then, as U.S. voters went to the polls, scores of his supporters gathered for a celebratory party in Budapest before the results were even called.

No foreign leader gambled so heavily or publicly on a Trump victory as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. A fervent fan of the U.S. president-elect, Mr. Orban has greeted the election results with unrestrained glee.

Speaking at a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Orban said he had “only partly delivered on his promise” about Champagne: He was in Kyrgyzstan when the result came through, and mostly drank vodka to “share our joy at this fantastic result.” He told his followers on X that he had already spoken with the president-elect, adding: “We have big plans.”

For Mr. Orban and like-minded populist European politicians in Germany, the Netherlands, Serbia and elsewhere, this week’s election not only returned a fellow believer in tough immigration policies to the White House. It also sent a message to their own constituencies that history is moving in their direction and that political rivals they revile as woke, out-of-touch elitists are on the run.

“Politically this is a big win for Mr. Orban: He gambled and he won,” said Zsombor Zeold, a former Hungarian diplomat. More broadly, he said, the election of Mr. Trump “definitely puts wind in the sails of Europe’s populist right.”

Among those likely to get a lift, he said, are European parties affiliated with the Conservative Political Action Conference, an American pro-Trump organization that holds an annual gathering in Budapest.

The group has cultivated close ties with European politicians like Geert Wilders, a Dutch far-right leader who won the most votes in an election last year but was shunned by establishment parties whose support he needed to form a government.

“Trump’s success is an encouragement and a boost for populist forces in the world,” said Csaba Lukacs, the managing director of Magyar Hang, a conservative media outlet that is critical of Hungary’s governing Fidesz party, which Mr. Lukacs supported for many years but turned against because of what he considers Mr. Orban’s intolerance of criticism and tolerance of rampant corruption.

Mr. Orban, hungry for a success after a series of domestic and foreign setbacks, needed a Trump victory, Mr. Lukacs said. “He can and will exploit this in the short term.”

Mr. Trump has described Mr. Orban, whom critics accuse of muzzling the media and overseeing a broad system of patronage politics that has enriched his associates and family, as a “very great leader, a very strong man,” whom some dislike only “because he’s too strong.”

Many hard-right parties in Europe have a complicated relationship with the United States, which some see as an arrogant hegemon that promotes values at odds with their own. Deep currents of anti-Americanism run through the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen in France and Alternative for Germany, or AfD, for instance.

But they have cheered at the prospect of having Mr. Trump back in power.

The AfD leader, Alice Weidel, swiftly claimed common cause with Mr. Trump on Wednesday, saying, “He is of course a model for us.” His slogan of Make America Great Again, she told Deutschlandfunk radio, was no different from her party’s program of “making Germany great,” because “we as the AfD stand up for the national interests and for the people” of Germany.

On Wednesday, Mr. Wilders and President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia, a strongman leader who has in the past accused the State Department of working of working to topple him, enthusiastically welcomed Mr. Trump’s win.

When Hungary assumed the European Union’s six-month rotating presidency in July, it stirred dismay by mimicking Mr. Trump and adopting the motto “Make Europe Great Again.”

How much Trumpism can be transferred to Europe beyond MAGA-like slogans remains to be seen. But its style and, on issues like immigration, its substance have already taken hold.

That is thanks in part to Mr. Orban, whose determination to keep migrants out by erecting high fences patrolled by sometimes brutal security forces drew widespread condemnation during Europe’s 2015 migration crisis. But Austria, Italy, Slovakia and many other countries have since emulated his tough stance on the issue.

In Italy, the right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has long cultivated ties to Mr. Trump’s camp, and has praised him. Her party, which traces its roots to postwar fascist groups, has advocated controversial measures to control immigration, including a plan, stalled by Italian courts, to send would-be asylum seekers to detention camps in Albania.

On Wednesday, Ms. Meloni said she had spoken to Mr. Trump by telephone and congratulated him. The next day, she posted a message on X saying she had also congratulated Elon Musk, the billionaire supporter of Mr. Trump whom she referred to as a “friend.”

While Europe’s nationalist right is united in its admiration for Mr. Trump’s opposition to immigration and his disdain for establishment conventions, there are also differences.

Ms. Meloni’s robust support for NATO and its aid to Ukraine against Russia could put her at odds with Ukraine-skeptic strains of the MAGA movement. And neither Hungary nor Serbia shares Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on China, which they have both embraced as an indispensable economic partner.

“China could be a source of tension,” said Gergely Szilvay, a writer for the Mandiner newspaper, which is part of a media apparatus controlled by Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party, adding: “But China can be handled, because there is friendship and a close ideological alignment.”

The American election came at a difficult time for Mr. Orban. Hungary’s economy has slipped into recession for the second time in three years, and Fidesz is being challenged by an upstart opposition political party.

Mr. Orban had banked on a Trump victory to show that he and Hungary are not isolated, analysts said.

“Everything is about framing our prime minister as an influential figure on the global stage,” said Mr. Zeold, the former diplomat.

Mr. Orban has been working for years, with mixed results, to establish himself as the standard-bearer of a pan-European movement committed to protecting national sovereignty through tough border controls and resistance to what he sees as meddling by European Union officials.

He had hoped to achieve that goal in June when Hungary and the European Union’s 26 other members elected a new European Parliament. But his predictions that he and his allies would “take over Brussels” fizzled, leaving mainstream politicians in control.

Last week, Mr. Orban sent his political adviser, Balazs Orban — no relation — to Arizona to attend a Trump rally with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News presenter. “Peace, border protection and economic development — this is the new American agenda,” the adviser said on Facebook.

On Tuesday evening, scores of Mr. Orban’s conservative allies gathered for a party co-hosted by the Center for Fundamental Rights, a government-funded research group whose president said a Trump win was “crucial for the preservation of Western civilization.”

Some of the guests, nearly all Hungarians with no right to vote in America, wore red MAGA hats. The hosts handed out red lapel pins pitching “Woke Zero,” a play on Coke Zero, and displayed pictures of a shrieking Kamala Harris being blasted by “Woke busters.”

The United States ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, a Biden administration appointee who has often criticized the transformation of a once-vibrant democracy into what often looks like a one-party state, on Wednesday lambasted Mr. Orban’s all-chips-on-Trump approach as “a reckless gamble on an election that could have gone either way.”

It may have won its bet on Mr. Trump, he added, but “Hungary’s government has a gambling problem” that erodes the trust of its allies in NATO, an alliance of countries not political parties. “Win or lose the hand, it comes with a cost.”

Soon after the election was called, pro-government media outlets began publishing articles calling for Mr. Pressman’s swift replacement as ambassador.

Mr. Orban, said Tamas Magyarics, a professor at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and former director of the Hungarian foreign minister’s North America department, considered that American foreign policy under Republican presidents tended to be less intrusive, and “believes that the Democrats want to destroy his government.” But, Mr. Magyarics added, Mr. Orban had perhaps exaggerated Republicans’ interest in and support for Hungary.

“The United States has 350 million people. Hungary is a country with less than 10 million far away in Central Europe — and has zero strategic influence.”

Mr. Orban himself acknowledged on Thursday that “size matters,” saying that the president-elect “has bigger things to do than dealing with the sufferings of Hungarians.”

Barnabas Heincz contributed reporting.

President-elect Donald J. Trump spoke on Wednesday with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and during the call handed the phone to Elon Musk, the increasingly influential billionaire who has played a key role in providing communications capability to Ukraine in its war with Russia, a person familiar with the discussion said.

It is not clear whether the three men touched on any change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election. Mr. Musk was with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and the tone of the call was described as positive, according to the person familiar with the discussion.

A second person briefed on the call also confirmed Mr. Musk’s participation, which was reported earlier by Axios.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

On June 10, 2000, London opened the Millennium Footbridge, a futuristic pedestrian path spanning the River Thames, hanging between suspension cables that was designed to look like a ribbon of steel. But as a steady stream of people began to flow across the new bridge, it began to wobble alarmingly from side to side.

Engineers figured out the problem: The bridge was designed for pedestrians who moved randomly along the bridge, their individual movements canceling each other out. But in crowds, people fall naturally into pace with each other, and as they did, their synchronous steps caused bigger and bigger swings of the bridge. The city shut it down after only two days for an expensive revamp.

I’ve had unstable structures on my mind lately.

My recent Times Magazine story was a deep dive into the game theory of democracy: what keeps the democratic equilibrium in place, and what causes it to wobble off balance, or collapse entirely. As I reported the piece, I began imagining the different democratic systems as suspension bridges, with checks and balances as their cables. What happens when pressure pushes the suspension out of balance, or even into complete collapse?

In Hungary, for example, a quirk of the country’s constitution ended up handing Prime Minister Viktor Orban a supermajority in parliament, and with it the ability to amend the constitution more or less at will. Orban used that authority to insulate himself from electoral challenges and dismantle liberal democracy, turning the courts and media into instruments of his power, rather than checks on it.

And in Venezuela, the democratic equilibrium was catastrophically weakened by a supreme court decision early in the presidency of Hugo Chávez. He had announced a referendum asking citizens to vote on replacing the constitution — a measure that appeared to be illegal, because it violated the existing procedures for constitutional amendments.

But the court went along with Chávez’s referendum, paving the way for him to gain control over Venezuela’s major institutions. He held power for 14 years, until his death. His handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, is still in office.

Now let’s take a look at the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris staked her campaign on the idea that democracy was on the ballot, and that a vote for former and future President Donald J. Trump could lead to its demise. I’m sure you’ve seen how that turned out this week.

To be clear, the United States is unlikely to experience a collapse exactly like those of Hungary or Venezuela. For one thing, the U.S. constitution is notoriously difficult to amend.

But it may be very vulnerable to a different type of destabilization, one that comes from the political equivalent of the crowds walking in lock step on the wobbling Millennium Bridge.

Moving in lock step

The U.S. political system is designed to work a bit like the out-of-sync pedestrians the bridge’s engineers anticipated: many independent institutions and constituencies pushing in different directions, their opposing forces canceling each other out to keep the overall system stable. Power is divided not just among the three branches of government at the federal level, but among 50 state governments as well.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers, explaining why checks and balances were a necessary bulwark against tyranny.

For much of the country’s history, U.S. institutions were distinctly out of lock step. In addition to the formal separation of powers, state-level parties, media outlets, and other institutions created crosscutting pressures, forcing presidents to put together broad coalitions in order to govern.

That began to change with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws, which triggered a long-term realignment in American politics, write Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler in their new book “Partisan Nation.” Over the next few decades, politics became more nationalized, as Republicans and Democrats began to polarize around sharply different ideological identities and compete for control over the increasingly powerful federal government.

Those same forces began to bring political institutions that were designed as counterbalances into lock step. Partisan pressures, like the crowds on the bridge, grew stronger as they become more synchronous.

State political parties now function more like chapters of national parties than like separate organizations with their own agendas, Pierson and Schickler write. Issue groups have become part of partisan coalitions rather than sources of crosscutting outside pressures. The media environment has polarized as well, with right-wing partisan media developing into an ecosystem that is largely separate from mainstream outlets like The Times, The Washington Post, or CNN.

That partisan “teamsmanship,” they write, has undermined the different branches’ incentives to check each other. Politicians now face strong pressures to support members of their own party and oppose the other side. That undermines the effectiveness of tools like impeachment: If legislators will only impeach politicians from the opposing side, it becomes just another means of increasing partisan pressure rather than a restraint on excessive power grabs.

Over the same period, courts have become more overtly politicized, making them an additional vector of partisan pressure rather than a check against it. American courts still uphold the rule of law, but when judges are selected and promoted based on their political beliefs and loyalties, that inevitably brings a partisan slant to their decisions as well. That has ratcheted up the stakes of politics even further, because winning the presidency and Senate now carries the additional benefit of controlling a politicized judicial nomination process.

The United States is not Hungary or Venezuela. The American democratic equilibrium has thus far withstood the forces of polarization. But Trump will come back into the presidency into a system that is, in effect, already beginning to rock back and forth.

I’ve covered the brutal realities of Ukraine’s war on its eastern front lines since the Russian invasion of 2022, but my home on the other side of the country remained largely untouched by violence.

In September, the conflict reached my family in an unexpected way.

Our car and the apartment we live in were hit by a Russian missile while I was away on assignment, and while my wife and daughter were visiting family elsewhere. Even though none of us were at home when the missile struck, it was a jarring reminder that there are no truly safe places in Ukraine.

For almost three years, war has split Ukraine into two realities. One is near the combat zones, where Russian ballistic missiles and guided bombs are an ever-present threat. The other is in places where life carries on relatively normally, with most of the trappings of peace — but with the ominous sense that this can change at any moment.

The events of September occurred as I straddled those two worlds.

I was in Poltava, a city of about 300,000 people in central Ukraine, on one of its darkest days since Russia’s invasion. On Sept. 3, two ballistic missiles struck a military academy there, killing 59 people and injuring over 270.

Among the survivors was a 25-year-old who gave his name only as Markiyan. Sitting on a curb near a rescue tent, where emergency workers handed out food and water, he looked shaken and confused. His clothes were dirty and his skin scratched — clear signs that he had narrowly escaped the deadly blast. “The first explosion threw me under the stairs. When I tried to get up and reach the shelter, the second blast hit,” he said, his voice catching.

My team and I were gathering information for a story just outside the academy’s grounds, because entry was restricted. Rescuers were still digging through rubble, recovering bodies and evacuating the wounded. Each time the air-raid siren sounded, the rescue efforts would stop, and everyone would run away from the site, mindful that Russia often launches follow-up strikes during emergency operations.

Watching all of this, I felt a quiet relief that my family was far from this horror. Our apartment is in Lviv, about 500 miles to the west, out of range of frontline weapons and not often a target for Russia’s long-range missiles. My daughter, Emilia, could safely go to kindergarten and play on the playground without the fear of a Russian guided bomb falling from the sky. Air-raid sirens rarely sound in Lviv, and even when they do, there is usually enough time to get to safety. In Poltava, the cadets and staff at the academy did not have that luck.

That evening, I had a video call with my wife and daughter. Emilia excitedly told me about her day at preschool, and how she and her classmates had built a metal detector and searched for coins in the sandbox. My wife, packing for a trip to visit a friend in Germany, was planning to take Emilia to stay with her grandparents in the suburbs of Lviv, while I remained on assignment.

Between the night of Sept. 3 and the morning of the following day, Russia launched a major airstrike, deploying nearly 30 Iranian-made Shahed drones and 13 missiles, according to the Ukrainian military. Our reporting team headed back to the site of the previous day’s attack in Poltava to continue working on our story. While driving, I checked the news and saw that several strikes had hit Lviv. At first, it was unclear exactly where, but soon I began seeing the name of my street in the updates.

Even so, I remained calm, knowing my wife and daughter had left the previous evening to stay at my parents’ house. The odds of a missile landing right near our apartment in a large city hundreds of miles from the front seemed minuscule.

Then a call came in from my friend Anatoliy, a local journalist who lives just a few blocks from me. He told me that a missile had exploded in my neighborhood.

Suddenly, I was having to report on my own street, about my own family, where I used to spend quiet mornings conducting my daily routine. Now, it was on fire, with houses on the street and cars parked nearby engulfed in flames. I tried calling my downstairs neighbor but he did not answer.

News reports kept talking about damage to civilian buildings and casualties in Lviv. Later, my mother called to tell me that two missiles had flown over their house, and Emilia had told her grandmother she was scared and wanted to be held.

The first images of the attack began circulating online, and I realized one of the explosions had occurred near my home. Anatoliy sent me a video from a nearby rooftop. I held my breath as I watched, seeing the wreckage of buildings just 50 meters from my apartment. Our building had survived, though its windows were blown out and the facade was damaged.

A few hours later, Anatoliy sent a photo of the parking lot outside our building. Three cars had been completely destroyed. One of them was mine.

Physically, I was in Poltava, but my thoughts were in Lviv. For nearly three years, the war had always felt close, yet far from my family. But that night, everything changed.

According to the head of the Lviv Regional Military Administration, Maksym Kozytskyi, seven people were killed and 66 injured in the attack.

Now, when I am in Lviv and walk my daughter to preschool, I see the wreckage the attack left behind — a reminder that the war has reached my doorstep.

Even 500 miles from the front, the war can find you when you least expect it. How much longer will this last?

The authorities in Amsterdam on Friday were investigating what they called antisemitic attacks on Israeli soccer fans that took place amid a charged atmosphere surrounding a soccer match involving a visiting Israeli team.

The police in Amsterdam said that at least 62 people had been arrested in connection with attacks in the city, which unfolded over two tense days that saw people gather in support of the Israeli team while others protested its presence.

The Dutch police said the violence included assaults on Israeli fans by people, some riding scooters, who kicked and beat them in “hit and runs.”

Most of those arrested were later released, the police in Amsterdam said, though 10 people remained in custody as of Friday afternoon. Five Israelis who had been hospitalized with injuries were discharged, the police said, and between 20 and 30 others sustained light injuries.

Concerned about the safety of its citizens, Israel’s government warned fans in Amsterdam to stay off the streets and helped arrange at least three flights to bring Israeli citizens home — an unusual move since the national airline, El Al, normally does not operate on the Sabbath.

Street disturbances in Amsterdam, the Dutch capital, had been building since Wednesday night, a day before the match between an Israeli club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, and the Dutch team Ajax. Some people angered by the war in Gaza were upset that the Israeli team and their supporters had come to the city, and a protest had been planned for Thursday.

The Dutch police said that the night before the game Israeli fans had vandalized a taxi and burned a Palestinian flag. Officers later intervened to protect a group of several hundred Israeli supporters inside an Amsterdam casino after what the police described as an online call among taxi drivers to “mobilize.”

On game day, the tension and violence continued. Videos showed Israeli fans on their way to the match shouting an anti-Arab chant as they were escorted by the police near Amsterdam’s central train station. At the stadium, the police said, riot police units and mounted officers were required to keep pro-Palestinian groups and Israeli fans apart.

The game went on largely without incident, but confrontations and assaults on Israeli fans took place in several parts of the city in the hours after the match.

More than 800 police officers had been mobilized throughout the city in anticipation of the game, the Dutch authorities said, an extraordinarily large number that reflected trepidation about the potential collision of Israeli fans and supporters of the Palestinian cause in a city with a significant Muslim population.

“Because of an announced pro-Palestinian demonstration, in combination with the commemoration of Kristallnacht, we foresaw risks to public order,” said Peter Holla, Amsterdam’s police chief, in a reference to a 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany.

The violence appeared to be the product of multiple combustible forces in Europe: a rise in antisemitism on the continent, the charged atmosphere and unrest that can accompany top-flight soccer matches and tensions over the yearlong Israeli military offensive in Gaza that followed the deadly Hamas attack on Israel.

That issue has been on display in European soccer already this week. In France on Tuesday, supporters of Paris St.-Germain unveiled a 50-meter-long banner reading “Free Palestine” at their Champions League match. And in Turkey on Thursday, fans of one of Istanbul’s biggest teams did the same.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that he had spoken with his Dutch counterpart, Dick Schoof, after the violence. Mr. Schoof, in a social media post early Friday, condemned what he said were “completely unacceptable antisemitic attacks on Israelis.”

Mr. Schoof and other Dutch officials vowed to track down and prosecute anyone involved. The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, said at a news conference that the violence “has nothing to do with protest, or demonstration — it was a crime.”

“Hateful, antisemitic rioters and criminals harassed and beat up Israeli visitors who were guests in our city,” she added.

Gideon Saar, Israel’s newly appointed foreign minister, traveled to the Netherlands on Friday to meet with his Dutch counterpart as well as with Israelis and members of the Jewish community.

Videos circulating on social media and a video distributed by The Associated Press provided a glimpse of the tensions in the hours before the game. In the A.P. clip, dozens of men wearing scarves with the colors of Maccabi are seen gathering on Thursday at Amsterdam’s central Dam Square, where flares are being lit amid a heavy police presence.

Ten people were arrested there before the game, the police said, mostly on charges of disrupting public order.

At a pro-Palestinian protest in another part of the city, about 30 people were arrested on charges of disrupting public order and setting off fireworks at the police, the police said.

Videos on social media after the match showed violent clashes on the city’s streets. One video verified by Reuters captured a crowd of more than a dozen men appearing to attack someone near the city center early Friday. The crowd dispersed when emergency sirens could be heard.

“Mobs chanted anti-Israel slogans and proudly shared videos of their violent acts on social media — kicking, beating, even running over Israeli citizens,” the Israeli embassy in the Netherlands said on social media.

As the attacks went on, Israel warned its citizens in Amsterdam to stay off the streets and remain in their hotel rooms. Maccabi Tel Aviv warned its fans not to show Israeli or Jewish symbols outside, and to fly back to Israel as soon as they could.

Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, wrote on social media that the images and videos of the violence were of the sort that “we had hoped never to see again.”

Europe has experienced an increase in antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel a year ago that sparked Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, and tensions about the war have already surfaced in events as diverse as the Olympics, the Eurovision song contest and the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Earlier this year, when the Netherlands opened a National Holocaust Museum — almost 80 years after three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust — an angry crowd of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside and yelled, “There is a holocaust in Gaza.”

Yet anti-Arab sentiment has persisted in Europe as well. Geert Wilders, the head of the biggest party in the Dutch Parliament and known for anti-Muslim vitriol, wrote on social media after the attacks on Israeli fans that he was “ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands.” Using incendiary language in both English and Dutch, he demanded that “criminal Muslims” be deported, and criticized the government for not doing enough to protect the Israeli fans.

Investigators are now combing through public CCTV feeds, and they have asked witnesses to share any videos they filmed during the attacks.

“We are in the process of laying out the facts and investigating antisemitic motives,” Mr. Holla, the police chief, said at the news conference.

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands spoke with Mr. Herzog on Friday morning.

“Our history has taught us how intimidation goes from bad to worse, with horrific consequences,” the king said in a statement.

Reporting was contributed by Qasim Nauman, Nadav Gavrielov, Johnatan Reiss, Nader Ibrahim, David F. Gallagher, Aritz Parra, Lynsey Chutel and Aaron Boxerman.

For three years, Silvia Alanis visited high schools in a small town in northern Argentina, teaching sex education and providing teenagers with birth control as part of a federally funded effort to lower high rates of teen pregnancy.

But now the program has been largely dismantled by the government of President Javier Milei, who has called feminism a “ridiculous” fight that threatens Western values and described abortion as “aggravated murder.”

As part of a broader belt-tightening plan to address Argentina’s prolonged economic crisis, Mr. Milei is cutting programs aimed at women, and pushing back against policies that promote gender equity and diversity.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.