It was not long ago that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was marshaling European allies to resist the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He illustrated the point that a top American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, recently summarized as the way the United States wins the global competition for power and prosperity: “Be nice to your allies.”

President Trump clearly has a different view. His antagonism toward Europe has been public for decades, seeing allies as economic competitors and geopolitical parasites. And his decision on Thursday to impose controversially calculated tariffs on America’s partners, including Ukraine — but not on Russia or North Korea — laid bare his willingness to fracture a trans-Atlantic alliance that has largely kept the peace in Europe for 80 years.

Combined with Mr. Trump’s demand that NATO allies spend up to 5 percent of their gross domestic product on the military and his expressed desires to seize territory from Denmark, a NATO ally, the tariffs highlight long-term damage to American relations with Europe that are unlikely to ever be fully repaired.

“The tariffs are another addition to the perception and assessment in Europe that the U.S. under Donald Trump is not only an unreliable partner, but a partner that cannot be trusted in any way,” said Guntram Wolff, an economist and a former director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “That changes 80 years of postwar history, when the trans-Atlantic alliance was the core of the Western world and of the global multilateral system.”

As much as Brussels will try to preserve some of these key relationships, Mr. Wolff added, “It cannot on its own underpin the global system.”

Mr. Trump’s effort to transform the global order also seems to benefit Russia, NATO’s chief antagonist, by potentially weakening the Kremlin’s adversaries in the rest of Europe, though plummeting oil prices on Friday hit Russia as well.

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When Yoon Suk Yeol was running for president, he had the word “king” written on his palm. South Koreans dismissed — and ridiculed — it as a shamanistic ritual that reflected his desire for top government office.

But ​after his inauguration in May 2022, it didn’t take long for ​them to see an authoritarian streak in Mr. Yoon.

On short notice, he ​moved the presidential office from the graceful Blue House to a drab military building. When he turned 63 in December 2023, his security team sang songs honoring him as “a president sent from Heaven” and describing his “845,280 minutes” in office so far as “a time blessed.” Two months later, a college student who protested Mr. Yoon’s decision to cut government budgets for scientific research was gagged and dragged out by the president’s bodyguards. When journalists published what he called “fake news,” prosecutors raided their homes and newsrooms to collect evidence.

Mr. Yoon kept pushing the envelope, until he made his fatal mistake: ​On Dec. 3, he declared martial law​, threatening a deeply cherished part of South Korean life: democracy.

To​ South Koreans, democracy has never been something given​; it was fought for and won through decades of struggle against authoritarian leaders at the cost of torture, imprisonment and bloodshed​. All the major political milestones in South Korea — an end to dictatorship, the introduction of free elections, the ouster of abusive leaders — were achieved after citizens took to the streets.

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A Ukrainian geologist was shopping in his local market recently for pork belly, lard, salmon and grapes when he heard the shouts of a man who seemed drunk, complaining about President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Why didn’t Zelensky ask us before giving away our minerals to the Americans?” he yelled. A woman joined in: “The Americans are coming to take everything.”

The geologist, Volodymyr Savytskyi, 75, kept quiet. He is more hopeful about the potential minerals agreement that has dominated conversations — and exposed tensions — between his country and the United States.

“We just need to survive,” Mr. Savytskyi said. “I hope Trump won’t deceive us. I really hope he won’t. I believe the Americans should come, invest their money here, make their profit, but we should also get our fair share — our piece of the pie.”

In the central Ukrainian region of Kirovohrad, one of the country’s leading mining areas, reactions to the proposed deal are a mix of wary hopefulness, fatalism and anger. After years of trying to resist Russian influence and align with the West, many here reflexively view American investment positively, and are willing to use their natural resources to support the country’s most important ordeal, fending off Russia.

And yet, there are signs of growing skepticism about the terms and whether the United States, and specifically the Trump administration, can be trusted. Some people endorse the deal because they see Ukraine as having no other choice.

Under a soccer field in a Vienna neighborhood along the Danube, archaeologists have found a mass grave dating to the era when the Roman Empire was battling Germanic tribes almost 2,000 years ago, experts announced this week.

The grave was discovered in October by a construction company doing renovations for the field in Vienna’s Simmering district, a team of archaeologists and historians at the Vienna Museum said in announcing its findings. The extraordinary discovery was tied to what they called a “catastrophic” military event, possibly one where Roman troops were badly defeated and fled the site quickly.

Radiocarbon dating traced the bones to approximately A.D. 80 to 234 — a period in which more than a dozen Roman emperors ruled, including Domitian and Trajan, who clashed with ancient Germanic people in the region. An analysis of other items found in the grave, including an iron dagger, lance points, scale armor and a cheek piece of a helmet, helped confirm the time period.

Near the foot of one skeleton, the archaeologists also discovered shoe nails that came from distinctive Roman military shoes called caligae.

The discovery of such skeletal remains is exceedingly rare, experts said, in part because ancient Romans almost exclusively practiced cremation until the third century A.D.

“For all of middle Europe from the first century, we don’t have any unburned, uncremated human remains,” said Michaela Binder, the lead anthropologist on the project. “So aside from the military aspect, it is an absolute unique chance to study the life histories of people in the first century A.D.”

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is set to meet with President Trump at the White House on Monday, according to two White House officials and an Israeli official, in the second such visit by the Israeli leader since the president’s inauguration in January.

Mr. Netanyahu will arrive in Washington after renewing Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza late last month, despite efforts by Mr. Trump’s aides to broker a new truce to stop the fighting there and to free more hostages. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

In addition to the Gaza war, the two leaders are likely to touch on Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs, which include a 17 percent markup on Israeli exports to the United States. Mr. Netanyahu had sought to avert the tariffs on the eve of Mr. Trump’s announcement by voiding Israeli customs duties on American products — seemingly to no avail.

Still, Mr. Netanyahu’s expected visit underscores how the Israeli leader has seen his diplomatic standing in Washington shift since Mr. Trump’s return to power in January. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose relationship with Mr. Netanyahu grew increasingly fraught as the Gaza war wore on, did not meet him in the Oval Office until 2024.

Mr. Trump has aligned his Middle East policy to especially benefit Israel and has left little daylight between himself and Mr. Netanyahu. When he entered office for his second term, Mr. Trump made the Israeli prime minister the first foreign leader to be invited to the White House.

A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu did not respond to a request for comment on the visit. The Israeli prime minister has been in Hungary on a state visit, where he met with the country’s leader, Viktor Orban.

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When Nigeria’s third most powerful politician was accused of sexual harassment on national television this year, a fierce backlash ensued — against his accuser.

Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, one of four women in Nigeria’s 109-seat Senate, was suspended for six months without pay in February. She said the suspension was punishment for speaking out against Godswill Akpabio, the president of the Nigerian Senate.

Then, angry voters in her constituency in central Nigeria began campaigning to have her removed.

The ordeal has highlighted what women in Nigeria say is the sexism faced by female politicians in their country, and the risks of speaking out in a nation where few women hold political power.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation and sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest economy, but it has the lowest representation of women in Parliament on the continent. It ranks in the bottom five globally.

Through a written response sent by a lawyer, Mr. Akpabio denied Ms. Akpoti-Uduaghan’s accusations, and he declined an interview request, citing continuing legal proceedings.

“It’s a first at that level in Nigeria,” Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian minister of education, said of the accusation against such a high-ranking official. “But it’s a classic abuse of power, where a woman is denied the right to be heard out,” she added.

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A top Trump administration envoy to the Middle East was in Lebanon on Saturday amid U.S. pressure on the country to crack down on Hezbollah and as tensions with Israel flare despite a U.S.-brokered cease-fire.

Morgan Ortagus, President Trump’s deputy Middle East envoy, met with senior officials after strikes over the past two weeks threatened the truce that went into effect in November.

The Lebanese government has been trying to rebuild the country in the wake of the devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah in which about 4,000 people in Lebanon were killed and roughly one million displaced. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that had long been a dominant force in Lebanon, was severely weakened in the war, but still has significant influence.

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Henry Hamra left Damascus as a teenager more than 30 years ago and never stopped pining for home. “It was my dream to go back,” he told lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday.

In February, shortly after the Assad regime was toppled, Mr. Hamra and his father, Rabbi Yosef Hamra, finally returned with other Jews to see ancient sites that are remnants of many centuries of Syrian Jewish history. The new government of President Ahmed al-Shara, a former rebel leader with jihadist roots, helped make the trip happen.

The visit was hopeful, but it also broke Mr. Hamra’s heart. Fourteen years of civil war, and a thicket of financial restrictions imposed by the U.S. government and others, have crippled Syria, physically and economically. The sites he ached to see are in disrepair or destroyed, including the ancient Jobar synagogue and a Damascus cemetery that is the resting place of a prominent 16th- and 17th-century mystic.

“There’s a lot of work that has to be done and I think the only thing that’s stopping the whole thing is the sanctions,” Mr. Hamra said in a meeting with Representative Jimmy Panetta, Democrat of California.

The Hamras have joined Syrian American advocacy groups, initially formed in opposition to the government of Bashar al-Assad, in lobbying the United States to lift sanctions on the new government. The family, prominent members of Brooklyn’s large Syrian Jewish community, reached out to those groups for help making their visit to Syria, and were in turn enlisted to help make the case for sanctions relief, in a play calculated to intrigue American officials.

But Marshall Whittman, spokesman for the pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said, “Any change in policy must be based on a sustained demonstration of positive behavior from the new Syrian government.”

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