Since President Trump announced his wave of globe-spanning tariffs, Alex Tang has held morning pep talks with the dozen or so workers at his lathe-making factory in central Taiwan, preparing them for rocky times ahead. His business, like all of Taiwan’s export-dependent manufacturers, could be hit hard.

Mr. Trump’s 90-day pause on most of the tariffs gave Taiwan, and much of the world, some breathing space. For now, Taiwan faces a 10 percent tariff on many of its products, not the 32 percent Mr. Trump had threatened. The fact that China, Taiwan’s enormous manufacturing rival and would-be ruler, has been hit with tariffs of 145 percent might look like an opportunity. But that could cause aftershocks of its own for Taiwan’s exporters.

Taiwan needs to be nimble to cope with the new era of disruption in global trade, including the possibility that Mr. Trump could raise tariffs again, Mr. Tang said. His business, Aegis CNC, does not export directly to the United States, but many customers for its precision manufacturing tools are factories in Taiwan and Southeast Asia that do so.

“Some U.S. traders that buy from Taiwan have put on a hold, asked their suppliers to put orders on hold” while they try to figure out what might happen, Mr. Tang said in his workshop, a green corrugated shed surrounded by rice fields. “It’s a burden, this uncertainty because of Trump.”

During two days of interviews in central Taiwan, the island’s manufacturing heartland, other business owners echoed that sentiment: The tariffs are one cost, and the uncertainty is another. And they could face a deluge of competition from Chinese exporters, priced out of the U.S. market by tariffs and seeking customers elsewhere. Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, visited the central city of Taichung on Friday to discuss the tariffs’ effects with manufacturers.

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

President Trump didn’t seem to mind as his worldwide tariffs set off stock market sell-offs and wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth.

“Be cool,” he told Americans.

Then he blinked on Wednesday afternoon in the face of financial turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields that could shake the dominant position of the dollar and the foundation of the U.S. economy.

By pausing some tariffs for dozens of countries for 90 days, he also gave away something to his main rival, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with whom he has engaged in a game of chicken that risks decoupling the world’s two biggest economies and turning the global economic order upside down.

Mr. Xi learned that his adversary has a pain point.

As reckless and ruthless as Mr. Trump may seem to some parts of the world, in Mr. Xi and China he is squaring off with a leader and a party state that have a long history of single-minded pursuit of policies, even when they resulted in economic and human catastrophe.

Among Chinese, a consensus among both Beijing’s critics and its supporters is that the endgame may come down to which leader will be able to make his people endure misery in the name of the national interest.

“Tariffs and even economic sanctions are not Xi Jinping’s pressure points,” Hao Qun, an exiled Chinese novelist who writes under the name Murong Xuecun, wrote on X. “He is not particularly concerned about the hardships tariffs may cause for ordinary people.”

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

To hear President Vladimir V. Putin tell it, Russia’s economy has thrived despite Western sanctions, becoming more self-sufficient and reorienting toward new markets.

But there is one company that Russian officials make no secret about missing: Boeing.

The aviation giant’s planes play a critical role in Russia’s economy, connecting its far-flung cities. Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Boeing sold and maintained planes in Russia and operated a major design center there. It also bought much of its titanium, a key material for modern jets, from Russia.

As President Trump pursues a striking rapprochement with Moscow, the company has emerged as an early test of whether American businesses that fled Russia early in the war will return.

Boeing has said nothing in public about whether it is considering going back, and it declined to comment for this article. But the obstacles are considerable.

Mr. Trump has so far kept in place American sanctions on Russian aviation, which give him leverage with Mr. Putin as he pursues negotiations to end the war. And there is widespread skepticism in U.S. aviation circles about the business sense of Boeing returning to Russia, a reflection of the enormous damage that three years of war have done to the country’s standing in the American corporate world.

“If given the choice between re-entering Russia and drinking bleach,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant, “I’m sure that that glass of bleach is looking mighty good.”

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

Voters in Gabon are set to pick their next president on Saturday, and on paper they have plenty of options: anti-French firebrands, a general who staged a coup, a tax inspector and a female candidate in this oil-rich Central African country.

But most candidates and experts agree that the election might be a done deal. They say the race has been rigged in favor of Brice Oligui Nguema, the general who staged a coup in 2023 and has ignored his early promises to hand power over to a civilian.

“It is not a level playing field to begin with,” said Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Washington-based organization that is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Gabon is a resource-rich country of 2.5 million that was long ruled by one family. Although wealthier than other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, unemployment is widespread and poverty is high, making those key issues for voters.

Here is what to know about the presidential contest.

Who are the main contenders?

A 50-year-old general who swapped his uniform for jeans, Jordan sneakers and Michael Jackson’s dance moves on the campaign trail, Mr. Nguema is widely tipped to win.

Mr. Nguema served as an aide-de-camp to Gabon’s long-ruling autocrat, Omar Bongo, and was head of the Republican Guard under his son, Ali Bongo Ondimba, who was deposed in 2023.

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

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.”

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

The bedrock of the financial system trembled this week, with government bond yields rising sharply as the chaotic rollout of tariffs shook investors’ faith in the pivotal role played by the United States in the financial system.

U.S. government bonds, known as Treasuries because they are issued by the U.S. Treasury, are backed by the full faith of the American government, and the market for Treasuries has long been deemed one of the safest and most stable in the world.

But the Treasury market’s erratic behavior all week has raised fears that investors are turning against U.S. assets as President Trump’s trade war escalates.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which underpins corporate and consumer borrowing and is arguably the most important interest rate in the world, rose roughly 0.1 percentage points on Friday. The rise added to sharp moves throughout the week that have taken the yield on the 10-year Treasury from less than 4 percent at the end of last week to around 4.5 percent.

These increases may seem small, but they are large moves in the Treasury market, prompting investors to warn that Mr. Trump’s tariff policies are causing serious turmoil. It matters to consumers as well. If you have a mortgage or car loan, for example, then the interest rate you pay is related to the 10-year yield.

Ten-year treasuries are also considered a safe haven for investors during time of volatility in the stock market, but this week’s sharp rise in yields have made this market unusually perilous.

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