For the two men at the forefront of a trade war that has begun to rupture ties between the world’s biggest economies, the question has become who will blink first.

On one side is President Trump, who unleashed a disruptive plan to transform the modern global trading system with tariffs — only to back down hours after it took effect, pausing the import duties for every country but China.

On the other side is Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, who has a well-earned reputation for refusing to yield. He stuck to China’s tight Covid restrictions long past the point where they were working. He pressed ahead with his goal of making China the world’s leader in electric vehicles and solar panels, despite alarm from trading partners about the flood of cheap exports.

Now, as Mr. Xi faces what could be the biggest test of his leadership since the pandemic, he has been true to form. On Friday, his government escalated its response to Mr. Trump, raising tariffs on U.S. imports to 125 percent, despite concerns that a prolonged trade war could deepen China’s economic malaise. Before that announcement, Mr. Xi struck a confident note in his first public comments about the trade showdown.

“There will be no winners in a tariff war, and going against the world will only isolate oneself,” Mr. Xi said while hosting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain in Beijing, without explicitly mentioning Mr. Trump or the United States.

“For more than 70 years, China has always relied on self-reliance and hard work for development,” Mr. Xi continued. “It has never relied on anyone’s gifts and is unafraid of any unreasonable suppression.”

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It was a closely held, urgent meeting.

Iran was pondering a response to President Trump’s letter seeking nuclear negotiations. So the country’s president, as well as the heads of the judiciary and Parliament huddled with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last month, according to two senior Iranian officials familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Khamenei had publicly and repeatedly banned engaging with Washington, calling it unwise and idiotic. The senior officials, in an unusual coordinated effort, urged him to change course, said the two officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive issues.

The message to Mr. Khamenei was blunt: Allow Tehran to negotiate with Washington, even directly if necessary, because otherwise the Islamic Republic’s rule could be toppled.

The country was already dealing with an economy in shambles, a currency plunging against the dollar and shortages of gas, electricity and water. The threat of war with the United States and Israel was extremely serious, the officials warned. If Iran refused talks or if the negotiations failed, the officials told Mr. Khamenei, military strikes on Iran’s two main nuclear sites, Natanz and Fordow, would be inevitable.

Iran would then be forced to retaliate, risking a wider war, a scenario that could further damage the economy and spark domestic unrest, including protests and strikes, the officials said. Fighting on two fronts posed an existential threat to the regime, they added.

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The Israeli military issued new evacuation orders for neighborhoods in Gaza City on Friday as it pressed forward with its offensive in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, delivering a painful choice to Palestinians about whether to stay or go.

The orders targeted eastern Gaza City, including several parts that the military had declared evacuation zones last week. The move suggested that some people had remained in their homes even after the Israeli military had told them to leave.

Since the two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed in March, Israel has issued a succession of orders across Gaza, covering roughly half of the territory. The orders have left Palestinians in the north — many of whom have been displaced multiple times and returned home when the truce came into effect — debating whether to stay in their neighborhoods despite the danger or to leave and yet again face the miserable conditions of displacement.

While the United Nations has said that over 390,000 people have been displaced in recent weeks, the exact number of people remaining in evacuation zones was unclear.

“We don’t want to leave,” said Ahmad al-Masri, 26, a resident of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza who has spurned evacuation orders for his town. “Where will we go? It’s so very tiring.”

In some parts of Gaza, the military has called on people to leave and later invaded by ground. In other areas, it has put out evacuation orders, but has not sent in infantry. At least some Palestinians who have disregarded evacuation orders said they would leave if Israeli tanks move into their neighborhoods.

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Since a Paris court barred her from standing for public office, Marine Le Pen has denounced a “witch hunt,” accused “the system” of deploying “a nuclear bomb” against her, evoked “judicial tyranny,” and suggested her followers are treated as “subhuman.”

In short, the French far-right leader, having spent the past 15 years trying to shed the extreme image and views of her party and make it more palatable to the political mainstream, has paused her makeover. She has embraced a Trump-like fury against “the system,” now used as a byword for the alleged plotting of the deep state and political judges against her.

Nowhere has Ms. Le Pen addressed in any detail the charges emanating from a nine-year investigation that found she orchestrated an illegal scheme to divert public money meant for use at the European Parliament to her National Rally party as it stood on the brink of financial collapse. In delivering a guilty verdict and sentence on March 31, the judges emphasized that no politician stands above the law.

Ms. Le Pen’s approach may be risky. For now, it is unclear whether the energizing ire of President Trump and his ardent support will benefit Ms. Le Pen and the other anti-immigrant far-right leaders in Europe — what President Emmanuel Macron of France, a centrist, has called “the Reactionary International.”

Might Mr. Trump’s embrace undermine them, given the on-and-off trade war with Europe, the erratic unpredictability and the draconian government-slashing steps of the president’s first weeks in office? Europe, after all, is the land of generous social safety nets, not of libertarian state dismantlement.

“With her back to the wall, Le Pen has reacted like a wounded beast from Trump world,” said Raphaël Llorca, a center-left author and political analyst. “But her core electorate is dismayed by the stripping of public services, Musk and Tesla. It is much closer to Trump 1.0 and Bannon than Trump 2.0.”

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President Trump’s special envoy arrived in Russia on Friday to try to make progress on cease-fire talks over the war in Ukraine, meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin in St. Petersburg.

Around the same time, Ukraine’s allies met in Brussels to announce new military support for Kyiv and expressed doubt about Moscow’s commitment to peace.

The pair of meetings highlighted the widening approaches to the crisis between the U.S. and Europe.

Russia shows little sign that it is interested in peace, the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said in Brussels. He announced a surge of military support for Ukraine after a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, representing some 50 countries, including the United States.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attended virtually, as did President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and several other ministers.

Russia must understand that Ukraine can continue the fight, Mr. Pistorius said. “Given Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, we must concede peace in Ukraine appears to be out of reach in the immediate future,” he said. “We will ensure that Ukraine continues to benefit from our joint military support.” Russia, he said, “is still not interested in peace.”

Mr. Trump has demanded that both sides agree to an immediate 30-day cease-fire, hoping to extend that pause into negotiations on a more permanent settlement of the long war. Ukraine has agreed, but Mr. Putin has not, instead asking to remove some of the Western sanctions against his country first in addition to broader commitments that “remove the root causes of this crisis.”

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President Trump has big ambitions for the global trading system and is using tariffs to try to rip it down and rebuild it. But the European Union is taking action after action to make sure the continent is at the center of whatever world comes next.

As one of the globe’s biggest and most open economies, the E.U. has a lot on the line as the rules of trade undergo a once-in-a-generation upheaval. Its companies benefit from sending their cars, pharmaceuticals and machinery overseas. Its consumers benefit from American search engines and foreign fuels.

Those high stakes aren’t lost on Europe.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, has spent the past several weeks on calls and in meetings with global leaders. She and her colleagues are wheeling and dealing to deepen existing trade agreements and strike new ones. They are discussing how they can reduce barriers between individual European countries.

And they are talking tough on China, trying to make sure that it does not dump cheap metals and chemicals onto the European market as it loses access to American customers because of high Trump tariffs.

It’s an explicit strategy, meant to leave the economic superpower stronger and less dependent on an increasingly fickle America. As Ms. von der Leyen and her colleagues regularly point out, the U.S. consumer market is big — but not the be-all-end-all.

“The U.S. makes up 13 percent of global goods trade,” Maros Sefcovic, the E.U.’s trade commissioner, said in a recent speech. The goal “is to protect the remaining 87 percent and make sure that the global trade system prevails for the rest of us.”

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