Christian Ulloriaq Jeppesen remembers how this all started.

In 2019, during Donald J. Trump’s first term as president, Mr. Trump floated the idea of the United States buying the island of Greenland. At the time, most people in Greenland (and Denmark, the European country that controls it) thought his suggestion was a joke.

“Everyone said, ‘Ha-ha, you can’t just buy a country, he doesn’t mean it,’” Mr. Jeppesen, a native Greenlander and a radio producer, said by telephone. “Obviously that was the wrong way to take it. Look at where we are today.”

Now Mr. Trump has doubled down on his insistence that the United States needs to annex Greenland for security reasons. And that has Greenlanders asking the same questions as everyone else, but with a lot more uneasiness.

Is Mr. Trump just being bombastic again, floating a fanciful annexation plan that he may know is a stretch?

Or is he serious?

Based on his comments in the past few weeks, Mr. Trump appears completely serious. Never mind that Denmark’s leadership has said the territory is not for sale, and its future must be determined by the local population.

“For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Mr. Trump wrote in late December in a social media post announcing his choice for ambassador to Denmark.

At a news conference on Tuesday, the president-elect took an even more surprising swerve: He refused to rule out using military force to get Greenland.

France and Germany are taking Mr. Trump seriously enough that they both issued statements on Wednesday defending Greenland’s territorial integrity and warning against the threat of any military action.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany said the principle of the inviolability of borders applied to every country, “no matter whether it’s a very small one or a very powerful one.” The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said that it was “obviously out of the question” to threaten another country’s “sovereign borders.”

“Do I think the United States will invade Greenland? The answer is no,” Mr. Barrot told France Inter radio. “Have we entered an era in which the rule of the strongest is returning? The answer is yes.”

A further sign of Mr. Trump’s interest in Greenland came on Tuesday when his son Donald Trump Jr. suddenly showed up on the island.

The president-elect’s son landed in the afternoon in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, toured some sights, including a statue of an 18th-century Danish-Norwegian missionary, and was hosted by a Danish Trump supporter. He said the reason for the trip was personal, not official, but the president-elect posted about his son and “various representatives” visiting and said “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN.”

“This is all getting scary,” Mr. Jeppesen said.

At 836,000 square miles, Greenland is the world’s largest island, about a fourth the size of the United States. It is an autonomous territory of Denmark and elects two representatives to Denmark’s Parliament and 31 to its own, which is responsible for most aspects of the island’s government. Denmark, however, retains control over defense, security matters and elements of international affairs.

Its location and landscape make it attractive to Mr. Trump on several levels.

Greenland is strategically positioned at the top of the world, east of Canada along the Arctic Sea, and is home to a large American military base. It is loaded with mineral resources such as cobalt, copper and nickel.

And as climate change melts the ice, it is opening up new paths through the Arctic zone, which is becoming a fiercely contested region for shipping, energy and other natural resources, as well as for military maneuvering.

The blast of attention falls at a touchy time for Greenland. More Greenlanders are chafing for independence, and many feel increasingly resentful toward Denmark, which has played an overseer role for decades. Greenland has a tiny population for its size, and most of the 56,000 Greenlanders are Inuit, part of a group of peoples who also live in Canada and Alaska.

The Greenlandic language is completely different from Danish. Many people follow a culture and belief system quite apart from those in Western Europe. And, like Indigenous people in the United States and elsewhere, they have been treated unequally for a long time.

The Greenlanders’ disaffection with Denmark was heightened two years ago after revelations emerged about Danish doctors fitting thousands of Indigenous women and girls with intrauterine contraceptive devices in the 1960s and 1970s, often without their knowledge.

Danish officials have repeatedly said that Greenland is not for sale, though they have emphasized their desire for warm relations with the United States and signaled their openness to dialogue. Last month, Denmark’s king jumped into the fray by abruptly changing the country’s coat of arms to more prominently feature symbols of Greenland and the Faroe Islands (another territory under Denmark’s control) — a polar bear and a sheep.

Amid this debate over identity, many people are now puzzling over Mr. Trump’s intentions.

“Is it just a distraction?” asked Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “Or is it threat-based diplomacy?”

Aviaaja Sandgren, a nurse who lives in the small town of Qaqortoq (all of Greenland’s towns are small), does not want to be part of the United States.

“We would lose many benefits,” she said when reached by phone on Wednesday. “We have free education, education grants, free health care, and free medicine. Everything is free here in Greenland.”

“I know they don’t have that in the U.S.,” she said.

Denmark governed Greenland as a colony from the 1700s until the middle of the 20th century and heavily suppressed Indigenous culture. During World War II, the United States set up bases in Greenland to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis after Germany occupied Denmark, and when the war was over, it offered to buy the island from Denmark, which refused.

Greenland was incorporated into Denmark in 1953, with the Danes helping to overhaul the economy, transportation and education systems. In 1979 Greenland gained limited autonomy over internal matters and established its own Parliament.

Thirty years later, Denmark expanded Greenland’s self-rule and under that agreement, Greenlanders have the right to hold a referendum on independence. The reason it has not happened yet, analysts say, is that Greenland is still heavily dependent on Denmark for many professional services — including doctors, nurses and teachers — as well as half a billion dollars a year in subsidies.

Aaja Chemnitz, one of the two representatives from Greenland in the Danish Parliament, said she worried that Mr. Trump might be trying to pump up Greenland’s independence movement to further his own interests. “We risk becoming a pawn in a game between Denmark and the U.S.,” she said.

Greenland benefits from the Danish welfare system, she said, and it would do a lot worse if it became part of the United States.

“I’ve seen the American system,” Ms. Chemnitz, who lived in New York while working for the United Nations, said in a telephone interview. “I know how harmful it can be for equality.”

Mr. Jeppesen, the radio producer, said Mr. Trump might be misinterpreting the independent nature of Greenlanders. Greenland is not just a big chunk of territory. It is a nation, a story, a homeland.

“There is this enormous pride you get from being one of just 56,000,” Mr. Jeppesen said. “Greenland is amazing, it’s beautiful, it’s the most wonderful country in the world.”

“And it is a country fighting for independence,” he said. “Not a piece of property you can buy.”

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Berlin, Aurelien Breeden from Paris and Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin.

Lebanon’s deeply divided Parliament is set Thursday to try to elect a new president, potentially ending a yearslong political vacuum and ushering in a degree of stability for a country reeling from its bloodiest war in decades.

For more than two years, the tiny Mediterranean nation has been paralyzed by political gridlock and led by a weak caretaker government through a series of upheavals, including a historic economic collapse, a destructive war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and the collapse of the Assad regime in neighboring Syria.

Lebanon’s election of a president would be the first step in forming a full-fledged government with a mandate to steady the country. But, despite the urgency, it remains unclear whether anyone will be elected at all.

The country’s Parliament is fractured along sectarian lines and lawmakers have failed in 12 previous votes to elect a new president since October 2022, when Michel Aoun stepped down from the office at the end of his six-year term.

The vote on Thursday could be no different. Lebanon is facing diplomatic pressure by the United States and other foreign donors who have hinged postwar financial support on the election of a president. But it is not clear that the leading candidate, Joseph Aoun, the U.S.-backed commander of the Lebanese military (and unrelated to the former president), will receive enough votes to be elected.

“This election is about Lebanon basically reaching a necessary milestone in its much-needed recovery,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization. “However, the reality is that Lebanon’s various political stakeholders are nowhere near reaching the consensus needed to agree on who will be the next president — even in this very critical period.”

“The stakes are higher than ever,” said Ms. Khatib.

The 14-month war between Israel and Hezbollah has left swaths of the country in ruin with little money to finance reconstruction. The World Bank estimates that the war has cost $8.5 billion in damages alone. Lebanon’s security situation also remains volatile, and the government that eventually takes shape will need to steer the country through a fragile 60-day cease-fire that diplomats hope will become permanent.

For over two years, Lebanon’s stalemate has paralyzed state institutions and exacerbated the country’s already crippling economic malaise. Hezbollah, the dominant political force in Lebanon, has long been considered one of the main stumbling blocks by many in the country. The group scuttled a bid last year to elect a top International Monetary Fund official as Lebanon’s president by walking out of the vote.

But analysts say that Israel’s lightning offensive against Hezbollah, which decimated the group’s leadership and shattered its image as a behemoth holding sway over the country, may provide the window of opportunity needed to break Lebanon’s political gridlock.

In the run-up to the coming election, Hezbollah appears to be showing some signs of flexibility, although it remains to be seen how the vote will play out. On Sunday, a senior official in the group, Wafiq Safa, signaled that it would not veto Mr. Aoun’s candidacy as many feared.

“They have calculated that they are still powerful, but they will have to make some concessions,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Now, they need massive and large-scale foreign aid, and they also need a legitimate state within which to exist — within which to protect themselves.”

“The first building block is to elect a president,” said Mr. Salem.

The Lebanese Parliament’s 128 members elect a president via a secret ballot, a process marred in recent years by walkouts. In the first round, a two-thirds majority is required, an outcome that analysts have called unlikely for Thursday. In subsequent rounds, however, a simple majority will suffice.

If a president is elected on Thursday, he would then appoint a prime minister, in consultation with Parliament, who will be tasked with forming the government. That is likely to be a long process, and the resulting executive body will ultimately be left with the herculean task of reviving the crisis-hit nation.

The Parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, a key Hezbollah ally, said in an interview with local media last week that he was determined to elect a president on Thursday. He has pledged to keep voting open until a candidate is agreed upon.

Mr. Berri conceded however that there was not yet any consensus on who that candidate would be, marking a departure from previous elections where stakeholders normally reach an informal agreement before the vote itself.

Amid the mounting uncertainty, Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, who has become the beleaguered face of the country’s caretaker government, struck an optimistic tone on Wednesday.

“Today, and for the first time since the presidential vacancy, I feel happy,” he said in a statement. “God willing, tomorrow we will have a new president of the republic.”

Iran’s top ranking general in Syria has contradicted the official line taken by Iran’s leaders on the sudden downfall of their ally Bashar al-Assad, saying in a remarkably candid speech last week that Iran had suffered a major defeat but would still try to operate in the country.

An audio recording of the speech, given last week by Brig. Gen. Behrouz Esbati at a mosque in Tehran, surfaced publicly on Monday in Iranian media, and was a stark contrast to the remarks of Iran’s president, foreign minister and other top leaders. They have for weeks downplayed the magnitude of Iran’s strategic loss in Syria last month, when rebels swept Mr. al-Assad out of power, and said Iran would respect any political outcome decided by Syria’s people.

“I don’t consider losing Syria something to be proud of,” said General Esbati according to the audio recording of his speech, which Abdi Media, a Geneva-based news site focused on Iran, published on Monday. “We were defeated, and defeated very badly, we took a very big blow and it’s been very difficult.”

General Esbati revealed that Iran’s relations with Mr. al-Assad had been strained for months leading to his ouster, saying that the Syrian leader had denied multiple requests for Iranian-backed militias to open a front against Israel from Syria, in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

Iran had presented Mr. al-Assad with comprehensive military plans on how it could use Iran’s military resources in Syria to attack Israel, he said.

The general also accused Russia, considered a top ally, of misleading Iran by telling it that Russian jets were bombing Syrian rebels when they were actually dropping bombs on open fields. He also said that in the past year, as Israel struck Iranian targets in Syria, Russia had “turned off radars,” in effect facilitating these attacks.

For over a decade, Iran backed Mr. al-Assad by sending commanders and troops to help it fight against opposition rebels and the Islamic State terrorist group.

Under Mr. al-Assad, Syria was Iran’s regional command center from which it supplied weapons and money to its network of regional militias, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian militants in the West Bank. Iran also controlled airports, warehouses and operated missile and drone manufacturing bases in Syria.

The rebel coalition has now taken over much of Syria and is trying to form a government. General Esbati said in his speech that Iran would look for ways to recruit insurgents in whatever shape the new Syria takes.

“We can activate all the networks we have worked with over the years,” he said. “We can activate the social layers that our guys lived among for years; we can be active in social media and we can form resistance cells.”

He added, “Now we can operate there as we do in other international arenas, and we have already started.”

The general’s comments have stunned Iranians, for both their unfiltered content and the speaker’s stature. He is a top commander of Iran’s Armed Forces, the umbrella that includes the military and the Revolutionary Guards Corps, with a record of prominent roles including commander in chief of the Armed Forces’ cyber division.

In Syria, he supervised Iran’s military operations and coordinated closely with Syrian ministers and defense officials and with Russian generals — outranking even the commander in chief of the Quds Forces, Gen. Ismail Ghaani, who oversees the network of regional militias backed by Iran.

Mehdi Rahmati, a prominent analyst in Tehran and expert on Syria, said in a telephone interview that General Esbati’s speech was significant because it showed that some senior officials were parting from government propaganda and leveling with the public.

“Everyone is talking about the speech in meetings and wondering why he said these things, especially at a public forum,” Mr. Rahmati said. “He very clearly laid out what happened to Iran and where it stands now. In a way it can be a warning for domestic politics.”

General Esbati said the fall of the Assad regime was inevitable given the rampant corruption, political oppression and economic hardship that people faced, from lack of power to fuel to livable incomes. He said Mr. al-Assad had ignored the warnings to reform. Mr. Rahmati, the analyst, said that the comparison to Iran’s current situation was hard to miss.

Despite the general’s assertions about activating networks, it remains unclear what Iran can realistically do in Syria, given the public and political opposition it has faced in the country and the challenges of land and air access. Israel has warned that it would decimate any Iranian efforts it detects on the ground in Syria.

And while Iran has the experience of operating in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 — including sowing unrest — the geography and political landscape of Syria differ greatly, presenting more challenges.

An Iranian member of the Revolutionary Guards who spent years in Iraq as a military strategist alongside senior commanders said in a telephone interview that General Esbati’s comments about Iran recruiting insurgents might be more aspirational than practical at this stage. He said that while General Esbati had admitted a serious defeat, he had also sought to boost morale and pacify conservatives demanding that Iran act more forcefully.

The Guards official, who asked that his name not be used because he was discussing sensitive issues, said Iran’s policy had not yet been finalized but that a consensus had emerged in meetings he had attended where strategy was debated. He said Iran would benefit if Syria descended into chaos because Iran knew how to thrive and secure its interests in a turbulent landscape.

In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards have the authority to set regional policy and overrule the foreign ministry.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on key state matters, has said in at least two speeches since Mr. al-Assad’s fall that resistance was not dead in Syria, adding that Syria’s youth would reclaim their country from the ruling rebels, whom he called stooges of Israel and the United States. President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have been more conciliatory, saying they favor stability in Syria and diplomatic ties with the new government.

The tensions surrounding these competing views on Syria preoccupied officials enough that they embarked on a campaign of damage control with the public last week. Senior military commanders and pundits close to the government gave speeches and held question-and-answer sessions with audiences in mosques and community centers in several cities.

General Esbati’s speech, on Dec. 31 at the Valiasr mosque in central Tehran, addressed rank and file of the military and constituents of the mosque, according to a public notice of the event, titled, “Answering questions about Syria’s collapse.”

The session started with General Esbati telling the crowd he left Syria on the last military plane to Tehran the night before Damascus fell to rebels. It ended with him answering questions from audience members. He offered his most sobering assessment on Iran’s military capability in fighting Israel and the United States.

Asked whether Iran would retaliate for Israel killing Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, he replied that Iran already did, referring to a missile barrage last fall. Asked whether Iran planned to carry out a third round of direct strikes on Israel, he said that “the situation” couldn’t realistically handle another attack on Israel right now.

Asked why Iran would not fire missiles at U.S. military bases in the region, he said that would invite bigger retaliatory attacks on Iran and its allies by the United States, adding that Iran’s regular missiles — not its advanced ones — could not penetrate advanced U.S. defense systems.

Despite those assessments, General Ebati said that he wanted to assure everyone not to worry: Iran and its allies, he said, still had the upper hand on the ground in the region.

Russia bombed the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine on Wednesday, officials said, killing at least 13 people and wounding dozens in a brazen daytime attack.

“There is nothing more cruel than launching aerial bombs on a city, knowing that ordinary civilians will suffer,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wrote in a post on X that included video showing dead and wounded people lying on city streets as rescuers rushed to respond.

The local authorities said that more than 60 people were wounded in the attack, which the regional governor of Zaporizhzhia, Ivan Fedorov, noted “cynically struck the city in the middle of the day.” He shared graphic images on the Telegram messaging app that he said were from the scene, where medical teams and emergency workers were responding.

Slavko Khudiakov, a volunteer paramedic, was in the city by chance to recuperate between frontline rotations. He said that he raced to the scene of the explosion — blowing through red lights on the way.

“I arrived maybe seven minutes after the strike,” Mr. Khudiakov, 40, said in a telephone interview.

He said he treated a man “with a torn-off leg,” and before the night was over he had treated about 10 people with “heavy” injuries. At least four were missing limbs, he added, and others were wounded by shrapnel.

Zaporizhzhia was once considered relatively safe, but in recent months the city has increasingly come under attack. It is strategically important to Ukraine’s defense of the south, and also holds symbolic significance as the capital of the Zaporizhzhia region, which Russia has sought to annex. The region is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which Russian forces seized in 2022 in the early days of the full-scale invasion.

The death toll from Wednesday’s attack was the largest from a single strike in recent weeks, and comes as both Russia and Ukraine are trying to project strength before President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration.

Hours before air-raid warnings were issued for Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian drones attacked an oil depot near a critical military airfield in southern Russia. The attack was the latest in a Ukrainian campaign aimed at inflicting pain deep inside Russia even as Kyiv’s forces lose ground at home on the battlefield.

Ukraine’s military said early on Wednesday that it had struck the Kristall oil storage facility in Engels, around 300 miles from the border between the two countries.

It said the depot supplied fuel to the Engels airfield, which it has said is a staging ground for Russia’s long-running attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, and which hosts some of Russia’s long-range, nuclear-capable bombers.

A Russian official wrote on the Telegram messaging app that a “massive” drone attack had targeted Engels. Roman Busargin, the governor of the Saratov region, said that air defenses had intercepted the drones but that falling debris had hit an “industrial facility” and ignited a fire.

Two firefighters died battling the blaze, Mr. Busargin said around 10 hours later, as the flames still raged and he declared a state of emergency.

A video circulating on Telegram and verified by The New York Times showed several structures on fire at the Kristall facility, which is roughly five miles from the Engels airfield. Other videos verified by The Times showed what appeared to be multiple explosions and huge plumes of smoke rising into the sky.

Kyiv has repeatedly targeted the airfield in trying to limit the strikes on Ukraine’s energy system, which have plunged cities into darkness, battering the Ukrainian grid and forcing officials to scramble for alternative power options.

The latest attack came as Ukrainian forces were pressing what appeared to be a renewed offensive in the Kursk region in western Russia. Both sides have reported fierce fighting over the past few days in Kursk, where Ukrainian troops seized about 500 square miles of territory in a surprise cross-border incursion last summer.

Russia has since regained roughly half of the territory it lost. Analysts have said the renewed offensive appears to be Ukraine’s attempt to regain momentum and demonstrate its capabilities before Mr. Trump takes office.

Mr. Trump has vowed to bring the war to a quick end, without saying how. That has spurred concerns that his administration might cut off military aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration has been rushing to get additional assistance to Kyiv before Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is expected to announce a $500 million shipment of arms and materiel for Ukraine on Thursday, according to an American defense official who requested anonymity, lacking authorization discuss the matter publicly.

The announcement would come during a visit by Mr. Austin to Germany for talks with a coalition of Kyiv’s backers that formed after Russia’s full-scale invasion. It will be Mr. Austin’s 25th — and last — meeting with the group, which includes about 50 countries.

When asked on Wednesday whether there was concern about the future of the coalition once Mr. Trump takes office, two senior defense officials told reporters traveling with Mr. Austin that they were confident European allies would carry on the work — regardless of whether the new U.S. administration decreased its support.

While the scale of the new Kursk offensive remains unclear, military analysts have suggested that it could also be an attempt to force Russia to divert troops away from the front lines of eastern Ukraine, where they have been steadily wearing down Kyiv’s defenses to seize new ground.

On Monday, Russia’s defense ministry said its forces had captured Kurakhove, a strategic town in eastern Ukraine, after months of heavy fighting.

Many civilians fleeing the fighting in the east have sought shelter in Zaporizhzhia, which has been shaken by a spate of Russian strikes in recent months.

Several of the attacks have featured glide bombs — unguided Soviet-era weapons converted into long-range, more precise weapons with a “guidance kit” of small wings and fins. Experts have said they believe Russia has somehow modified the bombs to extend their range.

Previously deployed to devastating effect on frontline positions and near the Russian border, the bombs have increasingly been used to strike cities like Zaporizhzhia that were once considered beyond their reach.

Glide bombs are considered particularly dangerous because they are hard to intercept — and the local authorities said two of them hit Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday. There was no comment from Russia’s defense ministry.

Dmytro Sokolovsky, 55, said his apartment shook from the force of two nearby explosions on Wednesday. He could see the building that was hit from his apartment.

“I realized I needed to go there, as they hit the main entrance when the people were coming from work,” he said.

When he got to the scene, Mr. Sokolovsky said, “it was hell.”

There was a woman screaming in pain. Ambulances had not yet arrived. And people like him were trying to help the wounded. There were no stretchers, Mr. Sokolovsky said, so the wounded were loaded onto blown-off doors and carried gingerly as they slid in their own blood.

He called the strike a crime, especially given the timing: The end of the work day, when people were going home.

“They want to scare people,” he said of Russia’s military. “Tell them: we are not scared. No one who was carrying injured today thought to run away to save their lives.”

Sanjana Varghese, John Ismay and Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed reporting.

For years, France’s main far-right party tried to distance itself from the long trail of inflammatory and derogatory comments made by Jean-Marie Le Pen, its founding president.

His daughter, who took the party reins in 2011, kicked him out. It changed its name, from National Front to National Rally. And the party — long run by Mr. Le Pen, who called Hitler’s gas chambers “a detail” of history — has made a point of decrying antisemitism.

But when Mr. Le Pen died on Tuesday at 96, the party nuzzled him deeply in its fold, its leaders celebrating him as a visionary, an “immense patriot” and a “courageous and talented politician.”

“He will remain the one who, in the storms, held in his hands the small flickering flame of the French Nation,” the National Rally said in a statement, adding that his “will and unwavering tenacity” had shaped the party into an “autonomous, powerful and free” force.

There was nothing in the statement to indicate disagreement with Mr. Le Pen’s views or his caustic remarks. At most, it said he had been “unruly and sometimes turbulent,” often fond of controversy.

Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, said that the strategy of Marine Le Pen, Mr. Le Pen’s daughter and successor, “was always to set herself apart without taking full stock” of her father’s unsavory legacy. It was too early to tell whether she might yet do so now, he said.

“A venerable age had taken the warrior but given us back our father,” Ms. Le Pen, who is no longer party president but still a top lawmaker and leading force in the party, said in a short tribute on Wednesday. “Death has taken him back.”

So far, the party does not appear to be headed down a path of deep introspection. Instead, Mr. Camus said, it seems to be trying to “re-inject” a new version of Mr. Le Pen into France’s collective memory, safe in the knowledge that there will be no more racist or antisemitic outbursts from him.

But Renaud Labaye, the National Rally’s general secretary in the lower house of Parliament, said the party had already weighed in on Mr. Le Pen’s past.

“It was precisely his expulsion — an act made all the stronger by the fact that it was initiated by his daughter and that he was the party’s founder — that underlined the fact that his excesses and reprehensible positions were firmly condemned by the party,” Mr. Labaye said.

For decades, Mr. Le Pen was a pariah of French politics, considered so odious that many opponents refused to debate him. That had much to do with the party’s history: Its founders in 1972 included former Nazi soldiers, collaborators with the wartime Vichy regime and onetime members of a group that carried out deadly attacks meant to thwart Algeria’s struggle to free itself from French colonial rule.

Mr. Le Pen’s openly racist, antisemitic and anti-gay comments cemented the public’s perception of the party.

Mr. Le Pen, who was in paratrooper units in two colonial wars to suppress the independence movements in Vietnam and Algeria, once said that races “do not have the same abilities, nor the same level of historical evolution,” and he was repeatedly convicted of making antisemitic comments and publicly downplaying the Holocaust. He once compared homosexuality to pedophilia.

In 2002, after Mr. Le Pen surprised many by making it to the second round of the presidential election, left-wing parties called on their members to vote for his conservative opponent, Jacques Chirac. This was the most famous use of a strategy known in French politics as a “republican front,” which has since been used multiple times to stop the far right from taking power.

In that 2002 election, Mr. Le Pen won less than 18 percent of the vote. But when his daughter took over, she began what became known as an “undemonization” strategy, to cleanse the party’s image and broaden its appeal.

She distanced herself from her father’s antisemitic statements, declaring concentration camps “the height of barbarity.” She ousted her father from the party in 2015, when he was its honorary president, and said his repeated Holocaust denial showed that “his goal is to cause harm” to the party. Three years later, she renamed it.

Now the National Rally — after riding successive waves of fear and anger over unchecked immigration, rising inflation and deadly terrorism — is no longer on the fringes of French politics, with some of its policies more widely accepted.

Last summer, during a snap election, another republican front between left-wing and centrist parties prevented a far-right victory. Still, a record 124 National Rally lawmakers now sit in the powerful lower house of Parliament, making it the largest single opposition party.

Though Ms. Le Pen has softened some of the party’s initial hard-line stances, its bedrock focus on identity and its eagerness to change the French Constitution to restrict the rights of foreigners mark it in France as a far-right party, according to experts. Party members argue, for instance, that French people should have priority over even legal migrants in areas like certain social benefits and subsidized housing. That runs counter to the French constitution and Republican ideals, set during the revolution of 1789, which make all people equal, Mr. Camus said.

Many experts have characterized Ms. Le Pen’s “undemonization” campaign as mere marketing, and in the election last summer, many National Rally candidates were castigated for past racist or antisemitic remarks.

Some analysts said the party had no choice but to recognize Mr. Le Pen’s integral role in building its long-lasting, stable and successful movement, which is still dominated by his family.

But the party’s glowing remembrance of Mr. Le Pen was also a way to recast his image — and its own, some experts said.

“Paying tribute to Le Pen ‘undemonizes’ the party even further” by portraying him as an excessive but prescient politician, unfairly condemned for warning about the dangers of immigration, said Nicolas Lebourg, a historian who specializes in the far right.

“People who voted for the first time last year have almost no memory of him,” Mr. Lebourg said.

The tributes, from the party and others, are also evidence that Mr. Le Pen’s ideas — like drastically stemming immigration — are increasingly part of the mainstream.

“The importance that Jean-Marie Le Pen has had in our political life is the consequence of long years of denial and powerlessness on the migration issue,” wrote François-Xavier Bellamy, the leader in the European Parliament of the mainstream conservative Republican party, which historically despised Mr. Le Pen and was thrown into turmoil last year when its then-leader advocated an alliance with the National Rally.

“Those who insult him even in death refuse to first look at their failures,” Mr. Bellamy said.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2018, Mr. Le Pen assessed his own influence: “My ideas have made progress, even in the programs of my opponents,” he said. “That’s why my struggle was not without value.”

Even in death, however, he retains many political enemies, especially on the left. Crowds of hundreds gathered in several cities across France to celebrate his death Tuesday night.

“No, he was not a ‘great servant of France,’” wrote Manuel Bompard, national coordinator for the far-left party France Unbowed. “He was an enemy of the Republic.”

And Mélanie Vogel, a Green party senator, said on X: “His ideas, the danger they represent for our democracies are very much alive. Let us finally defeat his heirs.”

Mr. Le Pen’s long life and political career encompassed the sweep of postwar French history. Even the Élysée Palace, home and office of the French president, who has fought to keep the far right out of power, acknowledged as much, noting in a statement Mr. Le Pen’s five runs for president, his seven terms as a lawmaker in the European Parliament and his roles as a municipal and regional councilor.

“A historic figure of the extreme right,” the statement said, “he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.

When Donald J. Trump won a return to the White House, many countries thought they knew what to expect and how to prepare for what was coming.

Diplomats in world capitals said they would zero in on what his administration does, rather than what Mr. Trump says. Bigger nations developed plans to soften or counter his threat of punitive tariffs. Smaller countries hoped they could simply hide from four more years of gale-force America First.

But it’s getting harder for the world to keep calm and carry on.

At Tuesday’s news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump declined to rule out the use of force in a potential land grab for Greenland and the Panama Canal. He vowed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” He also said he could use “economic force” to turn Canada into the 51st state as a matter of American national security.

For those eager to parse substance from bluster, it looked like another performance of scattershot bravado: Trump II, the sequel, more unrestrained. Even before taking office, Mr. Trump, with his surprising wish list, has stirred up “here we go again” commentary from across the globe.

Beyond the chatter, however, are serious stakes. As the world prepares for Trump’s return, the parallels between his preoccupations and the distant age of American imperialism in the late 19th century are becoming more relevant.

Mr. Trump has already championed the era for its protectionism, claiming that the United States in the 1890s “was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.” Now, he seems to be adding the focus from the 19th and early 20th centuries on territorial control.

What both epochs share is a fear of shaky geopolitics, and the threat of being locked out of territory with great economic and military importance. As Daniel Immerwahr, an American historian at Northwestern University, put it: “We are seeing a reversion to a more grabby world.”

For Mr. Trump, China looms — ready, in his view, to take territory far from its own borders. He has falsely accused Beijing of controlling the American-built Panama Canal. There is also the specter, more grounded in reality, of China and its ally Russia moving to secure control over Arctic Sea routes and precious minerals.

At the same time, competition is increasing all around, as some nations (India, Saudi Arabia) rise and others (Venezuela, Syria) spiral and struggle, creating openings for outside influence.

In the 1880s and ’90s, there was also a scramble for control and no single dominant nation. As countries became more powerful, they were expected to physically grow, and rivalries were redrawing maps and causing conflicts from Asia to the Caribbean.

The United States mirrored Europe’s colonial designs when it annexed Guam and Puerto Rico in 1898. But in larger countries, like the Philippines, the U.S. eventually chose indirect control by negotiating deals to advance preferential treatment for American businesses and its military interests.

Some believe that Mr. Trump’s fixation on Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada is a one-man revival of the debate over expansionist pursuits.

“This is part of a pattern of the U.S. exerting control, or trying to, over areas of the globe perceived to be American interests, without having to summon up the dreaded words ‘empire,’ ‘colonies’ or ‘imperialism,’ while still extracting material benefits,” said Ian Tyrrell, a historian of American empire at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Mr. Trump’s threats of territorial takeover may be simply a transactional starting point or some kind of personal wish. The United States already has a deal with Denmark that allows for base operations in Greenland.

His suggestion of Americanization there and elsewhere amounts to what many foreign diplomats and scholars see as an escalation more than a break with the past. For years, the United States has been trying to curtail Chinese ambitions with a familiar playbook.

The Philippines is again a focus, with new deals for bases the American military can use in any potential war with Beijing. So are the sea routes that matter most for trade both in Asia and around the Arctic as climate change melts the ice and makes navigation easier.

“What the U.S. always wanted was access to markets, lines of communication and capacity for forward projections of material power,” Professor Tyrrell said.

But for some regions in particular, past as prologue inspires dread.

Panama and its neighbors tend to see Mr. Trump’s comments as a blend of both the 1890s and the 1980s, when the Cold War led Washington to meddle in many Latin American countries under the guise of fighting Communism. The Monroe Doctrine, another 19th-century creation that saw the United States treat the Western Hemisphere as its exclusive sphere of influence, has re-emerged into relevance alongside tariffs and territorial deals.

Carlos Puig, a popular columnist in Mexico City, said Latin America was more worried about Mr. Trump’s return than any other part of the world.

“This is Trump, with majorities in both houses, after four years complaining, a guy that only cares about himself and winning at all cost,” Mr. Puig said. “Not easy for a guy like that not to show that he is trying to fulfill his promises, no matter how crazy they are. I am not so sure everything is just bullying and almost comic provocations.”

But how much can Mr. Trump actually achieve or damage?

His news conference in Florida mixed vague threats (“It might be that you’ll have to do something”) with messianic promises (“I’m talking about protecting the free world”).

It was more than enough to awaken other nations, drawing rapt attention and resistance even before he has taken office.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, on Wednesday warned against threatening the “sovereign borders” of the European Union — referring to Denmark’s territory of Greenland. He added that “we have entered an era that is seeing the return of the law of the strongest.”

What may be harder to see from Mar-a-Lago but is much discussed in foreign capitals: Many countries are simply tired of the America Mr. Trump wants to make great again.

While the United States is still a dominant force, it has less leverage than in the 1980s or the 1890s, not just because of China’s rise, but because of what many nations see as America’s own drift into dysfunction and debt, coupled with the surge in development by other countries.

The international system the United States helped set up after World War II prioritized trade in hopes of deterring conquest — and it worked well enough to build paths to prosperity that made American unilateralism less potent.

As Sarang Shidore, the director of the global south program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, explained, many developing nations “are savvier, more assertive and capable even as the U.S. has become less predictable and stable.”

In other words, today the world is unsettled. The postwar equilibrium is being shaken by wars in Europe and the Middle East; by the autocratic partnership of China, Russia and North Korea; by a weakened Iran that is seeking nuclear weapons; and by climate change and artificial intelligence.

The end of the 19th century was turbulent, too. The mistake Mr. Trump may be making now, according to historians, is thinking that the world can be calmed and simplified with additional U.S. real estate.

The protectionist, imperialist age Mr. Trump seemingly romanticizes blew up when Germany and Italy tried to muscle in for a greater share of the world. The result was two world wars.

“We saw how that went with 20th-century weaponry,” said Mr. Immerwahr, the author of “How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States.” “It’s potentially far more dangerous in the 21st.”

Rescuers working in subzero conditions and bracing winds searched the rubble on Wednesday after a strong quake in Tibet toppled thousands of houses in a remote area near the northern foothills of Mount Everest. Tens of thousands of residents were being transferred to safety while dozens were being treated for injuries.

At least 126 people have died and 188 were injured in the quake, which struck on Tuesday morning in Dingri County, near one of Tibet’s most historic cities, in western China, state media reported. The quake was China’s deadliest since December 2023, when 151 people were killed in a magnitude 6.2 temblor in the northwestern provinces of Gansu and Qinghai.

The area has since recorded more than 600 aftershocks, some exceeding a magnitude of 4.0, Chinese state media said. Survivors and rescuers have had to brave freezing temperatures, as the mercury dropped to a low of minus 18 degrees Celsius or 0 Fahrenheit at night. Recent aerial images near the epicenter showed frozen lake surfaces, and temperatures are expected to remain low for the next three days, which could narrow the window for rescuing survivors.

The true extent of the damage was hard to determine independently. Tibet is one of the most inaccessible and underdeveloped parts of China. Security has been heightened for decades because of tensions between Beijing and Tibetans, many of whom have struggled to maintain their cultural identity and religious traditions in a country dominated by Han Chinese. Foreign journalists are forbidden from traveling independently in the region.

Much of the relief effort is focused on warding off the cold. The state broadcaster showed video footage of rescuers setting up tents draped with an insulated layer and rigging them with light panels powered by generators as displaced residents draped in blankets huddled on cots and chairs.

Zhang Guoqing, the vice premier, visited hospitals and tent camps on Monday night. He instructed rescue teams to focus on finding remaining survivors, delivering medical care for the infirm, and ensuring that the displaced have enough food and warmth to survive the frigid winter.

Rescuers have pulled out more than 400 survivors from the rubble overnight. About 46,000 people were relocated to safety.

Chinese state media reported that road obstructions have been cleared, and electricity has resumed in most surrounding towns and villages. The state broadcaster showed footage of soldiers digging through rubble with gloved hands and shovels.

Li You contributed research in Beijing.

The political party on the verge of leading Austria would take an already conservative country into a growing group of nations shifting to the far-right of European politics. It has flirted with Nazi slogans, cozied up to Russia and drawn warnings from Holocaust survivors’ groups. It campaigned on promises to deport immigrants and ban political forms of Islam.

The Freedom Party, known as the FPÖ, and its firebrand leader, Herbert Kickl, were given the chance to form a governing coalition this week, after efforts to bar them from power collapsed. If they succeed in forming a government, it would be a shock to the Austrian political system and a further jolt to Western Europe, where similarly far-right parties are surging in France, Germany and elsewhere.

But it would not be a surprise.

The Freedom Party’s rise follows years of growing acceptance of the far right in Austrian politics. Its growth has been helped by scandals and an ideological shift in the more mainstream conservative party that has led Austria’s governments for 15 of the last 25 years.

Unlike in neighboring Germany, where all other parties have refused to include the right-wing-populist Alternative for Germany in federal ruling coalitions, other parties in Austria have allowed the Freedom Party to share power for years as a junior partner.

The Freedom Party has broadened its appeal in recent elections with an anti-establishment message that harshly criticizes immigrants, Covid restrictions, the European Union and support for Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion. The party has gained support from blue-collar workers, university graduates and, critically, women. In elections for the European Parliament this summer, it was the most popular party among Austrian voters under the age of 35.

“The idea that the FPÖ is somehow politically taboo, that train has long left the station,” said Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, a political scientist at the University of Vienna.

The Freedom Party was founded by former members of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force, in the 1950s. It was largely shunned in its early years, but then slowly became part of the political establishment.

The party first entered a national government with progressive Social Democrats in 1983 and has served in four ruling coalitions since, the most recent just six years ago. It’s also active on the state level and is in coalitions in the majority of Austria’s nine states.

Until the late 1980s, the Freedom Party was a small, elitist entity largely associated with certain nationalist university fraternities. A new leader, Jörg Haider, attracted more voters by adopting campaign rhetoric harshly critical of foreigners.

That focus has become the driving force of the modern party, sharpened and intensified by Mr. Kickl, who wrote speeches for Mr. Haider early in his career. Mr. Kickl steered the party into increasingly provocative slogans, including the xenophobic “Viennese blood — too many foreigners does no one any good.”

In 2017, the Freedom Party joined a governing coalition with the conservative People’s Party. Karin Kneissl, then the Freedom Party’s choice of foreign minister, was widely criticized for dancing at her 2018 wedding with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. She has since moved to Russia.

The administration and the coalition collapsed quickly in a scandal involving a hidden camera, a fake Russian heiress and a former Freedom Party leader in 2019.

During the administration, Mr. Kickl served as the country’s interior minister, putting him in charge of immigration control, a subject that has been integral to the party’s platform.

He made headlines back then for suggesting “concentrating” refugees in centralized facilities. Although Mr. Kickl later claimed that he was not trying to provoke, many believe that his use of a Nazi-era phrase referencing concentration camps was deliberate.

It was also not isolated. Mr. Kickl’s party has since repeatedly invoked the term “Volkskanzler” — “the people’s chancellor” — that was used by Hitler.

While others in the party have wanted to soften the anti-immigrant rhetoric, Mr. Kickl has capitalized on raw, emotional appeals to native-born Austrian workers. He tapped into discontent over an influx of refugees to Austria from the Middle East and, later, Ukraine. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he rallied opposition to vaccine mandates, lockdowns and masks.

In last fall’s campaign, Mr. Kickl promised to build “Fortress Austria” — by resorting to strict border control measures, the forced deportation of immigrants and a suspension of asylum rights for refugees, which would require breaking from a European Union agreement on migration. He called for a reversal of measures meant to fight climate change and a renewed focus on fossil fuels.

He has also pushed for political changes that some analysts say would push Austria toward a more authoritarian model of government, akin to Viktor Orban in Hungary. Those changes include new referendum procedures that would allow a relatively small slice of the electorate to force a national vote to overturn the government or dismiss individual ministers.

Mr. Kickl’s platform appealed to many voters, with the party winning the most seats in the September election for the national assembly. “There’s more demand for a certain toughness from politics,” said Christoph Hofinger, an Austrian election researcher.

For some, it caused alarm. After the election, Christoph Heubner, the executive vice president for the International Auschwitz Committee, said that for Holocaust survivors, the victory had added “a new alarming chapter to their fears and concerns.”

The Freedom Party has benefited, in part, from the problems of the People’s Party. The group won the chancellorship handily in 2017, after turning toward the right on many issues. But the People’s Party quickly fell into a series of scandals, including one related to rigged opinion polls published in the press. It also faced voter discontent over inflation and Covid restrictions, along with its most recent coalition partner, the Green Party.

After the election loss, Karl Nehammer, the incumbent chancellor from the People’s Party, said he would not enter into a coalition with Mr. Kickl. Many saw the promise, made during the campaign, as a play to hold on to the chancellery, rather than an ideological stance, since the two parties have a long history of working together in state and federal governments.

“There was never any fundamental criticism of the FPÖ’s understanding of democracy or the rule of law” from the conservatives, Mr. Ennser-Jedenastik said.

Despite months of trying, the People’s Party was unable to form a coalition without the far right. And Mr. Nehammer announced his resignation from the chancellorship this week, paving the way for the Freedom Party to emerge on top in a coalition.

In a governing coalition, Mr. Kickl will not be able to deliver on all of his promises. The next Austrian government will need to close a budget deficit, which could hamper his economic agenda, including tax cuts and social spending increases.

But the party’s popularity will give him a strong voice as he pushes for policy changes directed at foreigners and refugees, according to analysts. Likely among them: cutting social services to those who don’t speak German or reducing financial aid for refugees.

During the fall election, 29 percent of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party. Current polling now puts voter support at more than 35 percent.

“If Kickl ever feels like the other side is not taking these talks seriously, he just gets up from the table and forces early elections,” said Mr. Hofinger.