The gunfire began at dawn on Friday in the town of al-Haffa on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

At first, Wala, a 29-year-old resident of the town, leaped off her bed to the corner of the room in her first-floor apartment, flattening herself as the rat-a-tat of gunshots sounded outside her bedroom window.

When the commotion grew louder, she said, she crept to the window and peeled back the curtain. Outside, dozens of people were fleeing down the road, many in their pajamas, as four men in forest green uniforms chased them. Then, the uniformed men opened fire. Within seconds, four of the fleeing people crumpled to the ground.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was terrified, terrified,” said Wala, who asked to be identified by only her first name for fear of retribution.

The attack in her town was part of the unrest that has shaken Syria’s coast over the last four days and has killed more than 1,000 people, the war monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said early Sunday. It was the bloodiest outbreak of violence since rebels ousted the longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in early December, then sought to assert their rule over a country fractured by nearly 14 years of civil war.

The violence broke out on Thursday when armed men loyal to Mr. al-Assad ambushed government security forces in Latakia Province, where al-Haffa is. The ambush set off days of clashes between Assad loyalists and government forces.

The Observatory, which is based in Britain and has monitored the Syrian conflict since 2011, said early Sunday that about 700 civilians were among the more than 1,000 dead, most of them killed by government forces.

At least 65 civilians were killed in al-Haffa, according to the Observatory.

Another war monitoring group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, had not yet updated its figures on Sunday, but it reported on Saturday that government security forces had killed an estimated 125 civilians.

None of the claims of numbers killed could be independently verified.

Officials with the new government rejected accusations that its security forces had committed atrocities. But they said they were committed to investigating accusations and holding anyone who had harmed civilians accountable.

Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, called for unity as he moved to reassure the nation after the deadly clashes.

“We must preserve national unity and civil peace,” he said on Sunday at a mosque in Damascus, according to video that circulated online. “We call on Syrians to be reassured because the country has the fundamentals for survival.”

The violence has raised the specter of a larger sectarian conflict in Syria and stoked panic in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus. The region is the heartland of Syria’s Alawite minority, which dominated the ruling class and upper ranks of the military under the Assad government, and included the Assad family itself. The new government was formed from a coalition of rebels led by an Islamist Sunni Muslim group.

The Observatory said most of the civilians killed in recent days were Alawites.

On Saturday, the highway leading from the capital, Damascus, into Tartus was nearly empty as the authorities tried to seal off all traffic into the coastal region. Government security forces set up checkpoints along the main roads into and throughout Tartus city, the provincial capital, where most shops were closed and many residents were hunkering down in their homes.

Shadi Ahmed Khodar, 47, sat by the highway leading from Tartus north to Latakia, watching as the occasional ambulance or government vehicle sped by. The streets of his neighborhood had emptied as violence raged in recent days, turning Tartus into a ghost town, he said. He is an Alawite but, like many in the city, he said he does not support the Assad loyalists who have taken up arms against Syria’s new authorities.

But he was also terrified that security forces with the new government would no longer distinguish between armed Assad loyalists and people like him — a crane operator who had worked for the Assad government.

“Maybe they will just come here and say we are against them and kill us,” he said.

The country, he feared, was barreling toward more conflict. The violence had yet to subside by late Saturday afternoon and, down the road from where he stood, government forces at a checkpoint were warning drivers that gunmen were ambushing cars driving up the coast toward Latakia.

“We’re just in the shallow water,” Mr. Khodar said. “We haven’t reached the depths yet.”

In the nearby countryside of Latakia Province, armed Assad loyalists were holding dozens of government security personnel hostage after seizing control a day earlier, residents said. In other areas, local residents had taken up arms and stationed themselves outside their homes to protect their families, after hearing reports about government forces killing civilians.

In Baniyas, a town on the northern tip of Tartus Province, armed men who appeared to be with the government had stormed into the town’s predominantly Alawite neighborhoods late Thursday night, according to four residents.

Ghaith Moustafa, a resident of Baniyas, said he had spent most of Friday and Saturday huddling with his wife, Hala Hamed, and their 2-month-old son behind their front door — the only place in their small apartment that was not near any windows.

Early Friday morning, he said he heard the patter of shooting grow louder as armed men reached his building. Then he heard men shouting, gunfire and screams coming from the apartment below his. He later learned that his downstairs neighbors had been killed.

“I was so scared for my baby, for my wife,” Mr. Moustafa, 30, said in a telephone interview. “She was so afraid. I didn’t know how to not show her that I was also afraid for us.”

When the gunfire subsided around 2 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Moustafa said he and his family fled their apartment and sought shelter at a friend’s house in a nearby neighborhood that had been spared much of the violence. Driving away from home, he was horrified.

Every two or three meters, a body lay on the ground, he said. Blood stains were smeared across the pavement. Storefront windows were shattered, and many shops appeared to have been looted, he said.

The Syrian Observatory said on Saturday that at least 60 civilians, including five children, were killed in the violence in Baniyas.

“I’m shocked, I’m just shocked,” said Mr. Moustafa, a pharmacist. By Saturday evening, all he could think about was leaving. “We have to get out of here as soon as possible,” he added. “It’s not safe, not at all safe.”

Mr. Moustafa was among hundreds of people who fled Baniyas on Saturday, according to residents. Many sought shelter with friends who were not Alawite in the hope that their neighborhoods would avoid the brunt of any more violence.

Wala, the al-Haffa resident who said she saw men in uniforms shooting at people as they fled, was taking cover with friends and family in her apartment when security personnel knocked down the front door, about an hour after government forces had entered her town. A friend visiting from the northwestern region of Idlib, where the rebels who overthrew Mr. al-Assad came from, pleaded with them not to shoot.

“She said, ‘I am from Idlib. All my family is from Idlib. Please don’t do anything to these people. They are peaceful family,’” Wala recounted in a phone interview.

The men demanded that the friend hand over her phone and yelled at Wala to open her safe, which she did. They demanded that Wala’s mother give them her gold necklace and earrings, Wala said.

Before they left, the men issued a stern warning: Don’t leave the house. She and her relatives rushed back to her bedroom, terrified.

But about an hour later, as the gunfire subsided, they defied that order to try to help someone they could hear pleading from the street.

Outside, Wala said she found two men who had been shot. One was covered in blood and asked her in a weak voice to lift his head a bit from the ground. The other, shot in the thigh, begged for water.

Before long gunfire rang out again and Wala ran back inside. By Saturday evening, she said, she did not know whether either man had survived.

Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting.

When military and civilian experts on peacekeeping started meeting in Geneva in the spring of 2022, they insisted on discretion. Their topic was sensitive: how to implement a future cease-fire in Ukraine.

Last week, that group of experts went public for the first time, publishing a 31-page paper that delves into the technical details of how a cease-fire along a more than 700-mile front line could be monitored and enforced. The paper was shared last month via another confidential channel: a recurring meeting in Geneva between American, Russian and Ukrainian foreign-policy experts who are close to their governments.

The paper, one of the most detailed templates for a Ukraine cease-fire to have been published, is a sign of how quickly the topic of planning for a cease-fire has gone from a controversial and theoretical exercise to an urgent and practical issue.

France and Britain have raised the prospect of sending thousands of their own troops to Ukraine after the fighting stops, though there is little clarity about what that force’s responsibility would be. Russia has shown no sign of agreeing to such a force, while President Trump has offered few assurances of any American backup to it.

“One of the biggest cease-fire monitoring operations ever will be coming at us very quickly, with no planning thus far of what that would look like,” said Walter Kemp, a specialist on European security who drafted the Geneva group’s document.

Mr. Trump has said he wants a quick settlement and in the last week has taken steps aimed at forcing Ukraine to the negotiating table: suspending military aid and the sharing of intelligence to Ukraine, while repeatedly saying, with no evidence, that he thinks President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wants to make a deal.

For most of Russia’s three-year invasion of Ukraine, the possibility of a cease-fire seemed far-off and, some analysts say, a taboo topic. Kyiv and Western leaders sought to keep the focus on the battlefield rather than the complications of an eventual compromise, and were reluctant to speak publicly about the possibility that Ukraine would fall short of victory.

But Mr. Trump’s desire to end the fighting quickly has cast a spotlight on what will happen on the ground if the fighting does end. The previous cease-fire in Ukraine, negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015, was plagued by spotty monitoring and the absence of a way to punish violations of the deal’s terms.

Last week’s paper, produced by a Swiss government-financed think tank called the Geneva Center for Security Policy, laid out some specific numbers. It proposed a buffer zone at least six miles wide to separate the two armies, and a plan for 5,000 civilians and police officers to patrol it. The paper argued that about 10,000 foreign troops may be needed to provide security for those monitors.

The monitors would report on cease-fire compliance and whether heavy weaponry had been withdrawn an agreed-upon distance from the buffer zone. The mission would operate under a mandate from the United Nations or another international body.

Such a force could help prevent tensions and misunderstandings from spiraling into renewed fighting, but it would be separate from any “tripwire” force meant to provide a security guarantee for Ukraine in the event of another Russian invasion.

Thomas Greminger, the Geneva center’s director, oversaw cease-fire monitoring in Ukraine from 2017 to 2020 as the secretary general of the Vienna-based group doing the monitoring, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

He said he pulled together a group of cease-fire experts soon after the 2022 invasion began, to come up with options for how to make a future armistice in Ukraine more durable than the last one.

The experts included officials at international organizations and former military commanders with peacekeeping experience, he said. They requested not to be publicly identified because of the sensitivity of the topic for their institutions.

“We had to be quite discreet,” he said.

Separately, Mr. Greminger hosted confidential discussions between foreign-policy experts from Ukraine, Russia, the United States and Europe.

The participants in those meetings — whose identities Mr. Greminger would not disclose — acted in their personal capacity, he said, though they were expected to be briefed by their governments beforehand and to debrief them afterward. He said that the initial purpose of the meetings, which started in 2022, was “to establish a channel of communication” with Moscow, and that scenarios for a cease-fire or settlement were also discussed.

It’s not clear what impact, if any, the cease-fire proposal will have on the negotiations themselves, especially given the personal approach taken by Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. But the Geneva center’s efforts also shed light on the behind-the-scenes diplomacy that has been a hallmark of a war in which the West and Ukraine have sought to isolate Russia on the world stage while engaging with Moscow on some matters privately.

Back-channel negotiations with Russia, for example, have resulted in a series of prisoner-of-war exchanges and the deal that allowed Ukraine to export its grain through the Black Sea (until Russia pulled out of it in 2023). Throughout the war, the Geneva center’s paper says, Russia and Ukraine “have found ways to cooperate on issues of mutual interest.”

The paper proposes that the international monitors would work with a joint commission made up of both Russian and Ukrainian military officials. Through the commission, both sides could hold each other accountable and negotiate things like the release of detainees, mine clearance and civilian corridors through the buffer zone.

“This is going to be an unprecedented, difficult problem,” said Samuel Charap, a Russia analyst at the RAND Corporation, referring to the implementation of a cease-fire in Ukraine.

One reason is the length of the boundary between Ukrainian and Russian-occupied territory — some five times as long as the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. Another, he said, is the sophistication and range of weaponry available to both Russia and Ukraine.

Mr. Charap said he was not involved with the Geneva center’s project but was familiar with it, and that he was working on his own proposals for how sensors mounted on drones, aerostats, buoys and boats could be used to monitor a cease-fire.

He said that accurate monitoring would be a key factor in whether a future armistice in Ukraine would stick. Increasing the likelihood that a violation would be documented, he said, would reduce the incentives for either side to test the stability of the armistice. It could also lessen the chances that unintentional or rogue actions could trigger renewed fighting.

“I don’t think there is a blueprint that can be easily consulted that is on the shelf” for how to implement a Ukraine cease-fire, said Mr. Charap, who has long called for the West to explore a negotiated settlement. “In part because it was such a taboo issue for so long.”

Skepticism over Mr. Putin’s willingness to agree to a cease-fire, let alone stick to its terms, remains widespread, however; Russian officials pledged almost up until the start of the war that he had no intention of invading Ukraine. And no monitoring mission would be able to deter the Russian president if he decided to launch a new invasion of Ukraine.

Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a research organization in Berlin, said it was “dangerous to occupy your mind with this illusion” of a potentially imminent cease-fire.

“I don’t think it’s realistic that Russia will agree to something where Ukraine remains independent and sovereign, even in the territory it controls,” Mr. Kluge said.

He is the Taxman of Kabul, a bearded, black-turbaned Talib with a genial manner and the calculating mind of a computer-savvy accountant.

As director of the Taliban’s Taxpayers Services Directorate, Abdul Qahar Ghorbandi has the unenviable task of raising revenue for the government of a wretchedly poor, isolated nation.

From his perch behind an enormous desk next to a black and white Taliban flag, Mr. Ghorbandi rides herd on hundreds of Afghan taxpayers each weekday. He makes sure they arrive with income documentation and leave with a fistful of tax forms to fill out.

Teachers, money changers, truckers, wedding planners, grocers and others trudge the worn hallways of the imposing tax building, discussing their taxes with Talibs pecking away at computer terminals.

The Taliban have sought to ramp up tax collection after a severe economic contraction that followed their takeover in 2021. The authoritarian regime has been crippled by sanctions, in part over its harsh restrictions on women and girls.

U.S. aid, drastically reduced since 2021, could be eliminated entirely under President Trump’s budget cuts. That aid has gone to the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations working in Afghanistan, not directly to the Taliban government.

With the Taliban now in power, former guerrilla fighters must function as bureaucrats. In the 280-person tax department, they work alongside employees inherited from the U.S.-backed government that the Taliban overthrew.

“At the same table we have people with turbans, with beards, next to people with suits,” said Mohammad Walid Haqmal, spokesman for the Ministry of Finance.

The Taxman himself, Mr. Ghorbandi, was an undercover operative for the Taliban in Kabul before becoming a civil servant, he said.

Mr. Ghorbandi, who said he had a master’s degree in computer science, presides over a tax administration computer system converted from English into Pashto and Dari. He has hired IT experts to modernize the department.

He has also tried to instill a culture of transparency, he said as he took a break for a lunch of beef kebabs and rice. His employees are not permitted to handle cash. Taxpayers take their forms to a government-run bank and pay taxes there.

When he is not at his desk signing reams of documents delivered by aides hustling in and out, he said, he visits different sections of his department, asking taxpayers how he could make the process faster.

International observers say the Taliban have reduced the tax corruption and cronyism that Afghans say were rampant under the U.S.-aligned government, while streamlining the process of collecting taxes.

Although many well-connected Afghans once avoided paying taxes, Mr. Ghorbandi stressed that even as the government Taxman, he was not exempt. He said he paid 30,000 afghanis a month, or a little over $400.

However open and efficient, it is still a tax office, though, and not every taxpayer leaves satisfied.

Shamsurahman Shams, who showed up one day late last year, had a beef with the Taxman. He said the two private schools he helped run had not turned a profit the past three years — and he carried a plastic folder stuffed with documents to prove it. Yet he had been assessed 500,000 afghanis, or about $7,350, in taxes.

He engaged in a spirited but civil discussion with a department employee, showing the man his documents. There was no resolution. He was told to return later to resume negotiations.

Although it was not the outcome he had hoped for, Mr. Shams conceded that the new process was more transparent than the previous system. “At least they listened to me,” he said.

During the war, the Taliban ran a lucrative tax system that levied customs duties, trucking fees and local taxes in areas they controlled. They also earned millions by imposing 10 percent taxes — “ushar” in Islam — on poppy farmers, though they have since banned poppy production.

In 2023, the Taliban government collected about $3 billion in taxes, customs and fees, or 15.5 percent of gross domestic product. (The comparable rate in the United States was 25.2 percent). The biggest source for the Taliban was so-called nontax revenue — customs duties, mining revenues, telecom licenses, airport charges, and fees for national ID cards, passports and visas, the World Bank reported. That revenue, for the first half of last year, increased 27 percent compared with the same period the previous year.

Half of government revenues were spent on security and the military last year, and just 26 percent on social programs — most of that on education for boys, according to international observers.

Mr. Ghorbandi said the tax system was not designed to be punitive. Generous exemptions mean that most ordinary Afghans do not pay income taxes. Shopkeepers with annual sales below two million afghanis, or about $29,500, also are exempt.

Merchants with earnings over that amount are taxed at just 0.3 percent — a rate that American conservatives would surely appreciate.

There are no cash penalties or interest fees for taxpayers who do not pony up on time. But scofflaws can lose their business licenses and access to the banking system.

“We are human,” Mr. Ghorbandi said. “We don’t want to put burdens on our people.”

He and Mr. Haqmal, the Finance Ministry spokesman, said the ultimate goal was to eliminate all income taxes.

“It is a direct order from our supreme leader,” Mr. Haqmal said. “He said: ‘I need a tax-free Afghanistan.’” Mr. Haqmal was referring to Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s emir and head of state.

Another direct order from Sheikh Haibatullah has been the shredding of women’s rights and broader restrictions on civil liberties for all Afghans. Women are prohibited from traveling any significant distance without a male relative and are obligated to cover their entire bodies and faces in public. The sound of a woman’s voice outside her home is banned.

A striking feature of the tax department’s 15 sections in Kabul is the sight of female taxpayers in rooms crammed with men.

Lida Ismaeli, who operates a private school, sat next to a bearded Talib as he reviewed her tax status on a computer. She said no one had complained that she spoke with a male employee about her taxes with no male relative present.

Under the previous government, Ms. Ismaeli said, she never knew whether her taxes went to the government or into the pockets of the employee she paid.

“The system is better now — it’s more fair,” she said.

Down a darkened hallway, Mohammad Taqi Irfani, a money changer, huddled over a computer screen with a tax employee. Mr. Irfani seemed resigned to his assessed tax payment of 73,500 afghanis, or about $1,080, on his annual earnings.

He said he did not enjoy paying taxes — who does? — but his tax burden was clearly explained to him, and his business accounts were not questioned. Under the American-backed government, he said, tax collectors came to his office and demanded bribes to lower his tax assessment.

“They were in it just to make money for themselves,” he said. “So far under this government, no one has ever asked me for a bribe.”

Safiullah Padshah and Yaqoob Akbary contributed reporting.

Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, appealed on Sunday for calm and for unity as he moved to reassure the nation after days of clashes that a monitoring group said had killed hundreds of people.

“We must preserve national unity and civil peace,” he said from a mosque in Damascus, according to video that circulated online. “We call on Syrians to be reassured because the country has the fundamentals for survival.”

The violence erupted last week between fighters affiliated with Syria’s new government, headed by Mr. al-Shara, and those loyal to the ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad. Scores of civilians have been killed, according to two war monitoring groups, along with combatants on both sides of the conflict.

Mr. al-Shara’s remarks on Sunday came as fresh fighting was reported in the countryside of the coastal Latakia and Tartus Provinces. A spokesman for the Defense Ministry, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, told state media that government forces were combing the countryside for armed fighters loyal to the deposed Assad regime.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has monitored the Syrian conflict since 2011, said that government forces were attacking with drones, tanks and artillery on Sunday. In other areas, it said, government forces were searching for armed groups affiliated with the deposed regime’s military.

Amid a generational crisis in Canada’s relationship with the United States, the Liberal Party of Canada on Sunday chose an unelected technocrat with deep experience in financial markets to replace Justin Trudeau as party leader and the country’s prime minister, and to take on President Trump.

Mark Carney, 59, who steered the Bank of Canada through the 2008 global financial crisis and the Bank of England through Brexit, but who has never been elected to office, won a leadership race on Sunday against his friend and former finance minister, Chrystia Freeland.

He won a stunning 85.9 percent of the votes cast by Liberal Party members. More than 150,000 people voted, according to the party’s leaders.

“America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape or form,” Mr. Carney said in his acceptance speech on Sunday evening to an electric crowd of party faithful, directly addressing Mr. Trump’s constant threat that he wants to make Canada the 51st state. “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves.”

“So Americans should make no mistake,’’ Mr. Carney added. “In trade, as in hockey, Canada will win.”

He is expected to be sworn in as prime minister quickly, early this week, officially ending the Trudeau era. His first and most pressing challenge will be to manage the threat from Mr. Trump to Canada’s economy and sovereignty.

But, because Mr. Carney does not hold a seat in Parliament, he is expected to call federal elections soon after being sworn in as prime minister. In those elections, he will face off with Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party.

It’s a crucial moment to be taking the wheel in Canada, a member of NATO and the Group of 7 industrialized nations and the world’s second-largest country by land mass.

Mr. Trump has put his thumb on Canadian politics, through his on-again-off-again pursuit of tariffs against Canadian goods, which threaten to cripple the economy, and his menacing comments about annexation.

Mr. Trudeau summarized the mood within his own party, and much of Canadian society, speaking at the Liberal Party convention to an adoring crowd in Ottawa just before his successor was announced.

“This is a nation-defining moment. Democracy is not a given. Freedom is not a given,” Mr. Trudeau said. “Even Canada is not a given.”

Mr. Carney said he supported the retaliatory tariffs Canada has adopted. “My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect,” he said.

Canadian voters have suggested to opinion researchers that who might best stand up to Mr. Trump has been a key question guiding the choice of Mr. Carney and future decisions in the federal election.

Federal elections must be held by October in line with Canada’s rules. The Conservative Party, led by Mr. Poilievre, had long maintained a 20-plus point lead over the Liberals in polls, but the gap has been closing since Mr. Trudeau announced his resignation and Mr. Trump started making moves against Canada.

The latest polling suggests that most respondents would choose Mr. Carney over Mr. Poilievre if he led the Liberal Party into the elections. Polling also shows that Canadians would prefer Mr. Carney to negotiate with Mr. Trump over Mr. Poilievre. Mr. Poilievre has suffered a serious setback in polls, as some voters see him as too close ideologically to Mr. Trump.

And on Sunday night, Mr. Carney quickly pivoted to federal election campaign rhetoric to attack Mr. Poilievre, casting him as devoid of real-world experience and too admiring of Mr. Trump to challenge him.

“Donald Trump thinks he can weaken us with his plan to divide and conquer. Pierre Poilievre’s plan will leave us divided and ready to be conquered,” he said. “Because a person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him.”

Mr. Carney’s experience in handling major crises as a technocrat could also be giving him an advantage over Mr. Poilievre in people’s perceptions. Mr. Poilievre, 45, has been a lifelong politician without much experience outside Canada’s parliamentary rough and tumble.

The Liberal Party establishment rallied around Mr. Carney’s campaign against Ms. Freeland, a former top lieutenant of Mr. Trudeau’s, whose resignation in December triggered Mr. Trudeau’s own decision to step down.

And it has been clear that the Conservative Party also sees Mr. Carney as the bigger threat: It has been running negative ads against him, focusing on his personal wealth and investing decisions.

A key question will be whether Mr. Carney can sufficiently differentiate himself from Mr. Trudeau, whom he advised and was friendly with. Canadians want change after a decade of Mr. Trudeau, and the Conservative Party has been highlighting the personal and ideological links between the two men.

Apart from Mr. Trump, Canada faces a slew of problems for which many voters blame Mr. Trudeau, foremost being an affordability crisis, with housing and cost of living crushing for many Canadians.

But broader, more existential problems about how Canada is run are pressing, too. One is how to use Canada’s vast natural resources, including oil, gas and coal, as well as the vital fertilizer ingredient potash, rare minerals and uranium needed for nuclear energy.

Mr. Carney, in the years after his monetary policymaking career, emerged as a global evangelist for green investment, and he will need to decide how to make use of Canada’s tremendous natural endowments.

Immigration has been another key issue for Canadians. The country has historically been open both to economic migrants and to refugees, but, after the pandemic, Mr. Trudeau oversaw a rapid growth of temporary migration into Canada to help fill a labor shortage.

That has set off a backlash, with migrants accused of further straining a dysfunctional housing market and health-care system.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Carney also sought to brandish his Liberal credentials and convince people that, despite having made a fortune in finance, he is still a progressive, attuned to the party’s DNA.

“I know that markets don’t have values, people do,” he said. “When markets are governed well, they deliver great jobs and strong growth better than anything. But markets are also indifferent to human suffering and are blind to our greatest needs,” he added.

In 301 A.D., the Emperor Diocletian made a bold but ultimately unsuccessful bid to address the inflation that was rampaging across the eastern half of the divided Roman Empire.

Prices of everything from purple thread and feathers to slaves and cattle were dictated by his Edict on Maximum Prices. Violators faced the death penalty. Diocletian gave up power about four years after issuing his edict, watching his measure fail from his sprawling retirement palace in the heart of what became the city of Split in Croatia.

Now Croatia’s government is trying a similar tactic to rein in prices that have soared in recent years and sparked protests and retail boycotts by the country’s beleaguered consumers.

On Feb. 7, the government introduced price controls for retailers, targeting supermarket items such as bread, pork and shampoo. The penalties are less drastic than those decreed by Diocletian, mandating a fine of up to 30,000 euros, or $31,400, for retailers breaking the rules.

It is unclear whether the new edict will be any more successful than Diocletian’s, which economists say ended up being counterproductive by causing shortages, fueling a black market and enabling profiteers.

For the moment, consumers are still figuring out how to navigate the new system, which caps the price of 70 common grocery store products.

In Split, whose tight limestone streets and alleyways attract tourists from around the world, Anita Kargotic, 62, went shopping recently at a Spar supermarket, where two signs were posted outside listing the maximum prices allowed for a range of goods.

She tied her dog, an American Akita named Maja, to a post outside, and later emerged from the supermarket, with a haul of Kaiser rolls, popcorn kernels, soy flakes and crackers. Most were store-brand generics, already less expensive than more recognizable labels.

Ms. Kargotic said her money did not go as far as it once did, and caring for herself and Maja has become a vexing exercise in prioritization.

Flea collars and dry dog food? Those are necessities. Grapes? No, too expensive.

Staples like rice and pasta? Pass. “Those prices have become completely unreasonable,” she said, adding that she doesn’t think the new price controls will make much difference to her since she mainly buys whatever is cheapest.

“I’m always looking at lower prices, paying attention to sales,” she said.

Croatia, which joined the European Union in 2013, should be basking in a successful post-pandemic recovery. The economy has been growing at an average of 6.6 percent over the past four years, tourism has been booming and wages have been steadily rising. But that has also helped drive a surge in prices, with inflation hitting 5 percent in January after remaining stubbornly above 3 percent throughout 2024.

The rules that came into effect this month are the Croatian government’s third attempt at controlling prices by fiat since September 2022. The first two efforts were largely ineffective, with retailers simply refusing to stock most price-controlled goods.

The government says it is serious this time, with the law requiring that price-controlled products be available, and it has promised regular inspections and fines for violators.

Under the new rules brought in by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, shop entrances must display a list of all 70 items that fall under the government’s pricing regime.

Centuries ago, Diocletian’s edict accused some citizens of price gouging, and said their greed needed to be reined in.

In January, Mr. Plenkovic struck a similar tone when introducing his government’s measures.

“We support companies that work well and make a profit, but within realistic frames. That can’t be at the expense of the little guy,” he said at a stormy meeting with retailers in January.

Rudolf Nardelli, 80, another recent shopper at the Spar in Split, said he moved to Haarlem, in the Netherlands, five decades ago and recalls often leaving Split with his car’s trunk full of provisions.

“Now the prices in Holland are lower,” said Mr. Nardelli, who still divides his time between Haarlem and Split, as he strapped groceries to his bike. “Retailers here are inflating prices for no reason.”

Economists blame the increases on a three-headed hydra of pandemic-era economic rescue packages that flooded the country with cash, increases in public sector wages and retailers rounding up prices after Croatia adopted the euro in 2023.

Those with tighter budgets are facing unexpected sacrifices.

Leonardo Inacio, 28, was shopping at the Spar for protein, mostly chicken, to aid in his physical recovery from the demands of his job as a ballet dancer.

He said a monthly grocery budget of €350 used to be enough when he moved to Split from Brazil two years ago. That figure has jumped to €450, he said.

“I’m passing up on supplements,” Mr. Inacio said of the sacrifices he was making to make ends meet. “I’d much rather spend that money on something that helps me professionally, but I can’t.”

He said he had participated in the boycotts against retailers, but knew nothing about the government’s price regulations. He glanced curiously at the list of discounted items outside the supermarket.

“This could actually be useful,” he said, snapping a photo of the list with his phone.

But many people say price controls are not the answer.

John H. Cochrane, an economist and fellow at the Hoover Institute, a research center, pointed to the role Diocletian’s edict played in causing shortages and fueling a black market.

“It’s like trying to stem the symptoms rather than treating the underlying disease,” Mr. Cochrane said of price controls. “It offers people the appearance of help for a while, and then it takes a few weeks or, a month or two, for all the problems to break out.”

For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains.

Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and since.

Europe, jilted, is in shock. The United States, a nation whose core idea is liberty and whose core calling has been the defense of democracy against tyranny, has turned on its ally and instead embraced a brutal autocrat, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gripped by a sense of abandonment, alarmed at the colossal rearmament task before it, astonished by the upending of American ideology, Europe finds itself adrift.

“The United States was the pillar around which peace was managed, but it has changed alliance,” said Valérie Hayer, the president of the centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. “Trump mouths the propaganda of Putin. We have entered a new epoch.”

The emotional impact on Europe is profound. On the long journey from the ruins of 1945 to a prosperous continent whole and free, America was central. President John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 framed the fortitude of West Berlin as an inspiration to freedom seekers everywhere. President Ronald Reagan issued his challenge — “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. European history has also been America’s history as a European power.

But the meaning of “the West” in this dawning era is already unclear. For many years, despite sometimes acute Euro-American tensions, it denoted a single strategic actor united in its commitment to the values of liberal democracy.

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