Russian and Syrian fighter jets struck targets across territory seized by rebels in northwestern Syria on Monday, according to Syrian state media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The forceful response made clear that Russia, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s staunchest allies, intended to keep supporting him in the face of a sudden rebel advance.

Both Russia and Iran, another key ally of the Syrian leader, also expressed support through diplomatic channels on Monday for Mr. Al-Assad, whom they have propped up with military aid since the Syrian civil war first threatened his autocratic rule in 2011.

It is not yet clear whether they will be able to help hold off the rebels. On the other side, the rebels’ startling gains appeared to embolden the opposition in exile, with one of its leaders demanding on Monday that Mr. al-Assad commit to a political transition.

The opposition leader, Hadi al-Bahra, spoke from Turkey as rebels continued their advance through Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city, and the surrounding areas.

In just a few days, the patchwork of forces has seized control of a broad stretch of land in the west and northwest of the country, according to the rebels and the Observatory, a British-based war monitor.

While Mr. Al-Bahra does not speak for the rebels, their capture of Aleppo has seemingly reinvigorated his group’s longstanding demands for a democratic transition.

Mr. Al-Bahra heads a group of political and military organizations known as the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces that oppose Mr. Al-Assad. The group claims to represent a majority of opposition parties, but it has become increasingly irrelevant as the Syrian civil war has dragged into its second decade.

He told a news conference broadcast from his base in Istanbul that the rebel offensive was supported by a population weary of crimes committed by Mr. al-Assad along with his Iranian and Russian backers.

The fighting will continue, he said, until the Syrian leader acquiesces — a prospect that Mr. Al-Bahra said the opposition was prepared for.

Negotiations could start “tomorrow,” he added.

Mr. Al-Bahra demanded the implementation of the stalled 2015 United Nations Security Council resolution 2254, which lays out a road map for Syria’s political transition, starting with a cease-fire. It is, he said, “the only sustainable political solution in Syria.”

“We have the right to use whatever means to ensure its implementation,” he said.

Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.

On the shore of Lake Tiktalik in Canada’s Western Arctic, the thawing permafrost had set off two huge landslides into the water, leaving yawning craters on the tundra. These “thaw slumps” measured several hundred feet wide and just as deep.

Jaden Cockney, 17, clambered down the side of one slump as his boss, William Dillon, looked on cautiously. Jaden was part of the team that Mr. Dillon, 69, had created to measure the retreating permafrost. Only a few decades earlier, the permafrost had lain just several inches below much of the region’s surface. But now it was thawing so rapidly that it was being pushed further and further underground. Along shorelines, it collapsed into lakes or the Arctic Ocean.

For centuries, the Western Arctic has been home to Mr. Dillon and his ancestors, the Inuvialuit, as the region’s Inuit are called. But these days, the thaw slumps — like the one Mr. Dillon’s team was documenting 10 miles south of their hamlet, Tuktoyaktuk — are the most dramatic evidence of a phenomenon that could turn the local Inuvialuit into Canada’s first climate refugees.

Tuktoyaktuk itself now stands face to face with the Arctic Ocean’s increasingly angry Beaufort Sea, and rests atop 1,300 feet to 1,600 feet of thawing permafrost threatening to sink it.

At the bottom of the slump, the teenager advanced by leaping from mounds of solid-looking dirt to torn patches of tundra, avoiding the clay-like mud where he would have sunk. He was about to explore what even many permafrost scientists never manage to see up close.

Poking his measuring probe here and there, he approached a large column of ice that was somehow still standing. All around, the permafrost had vanished, leaving behind a chaotic landscape strewed with jagged patches of tundra, uprooted brown shrubs and previously frozen dirt that had turned into mud with sudden violence. Long-trapped organic matter was released, giving off the smell of freshly peeled potatoes and unlocking methane and carbon dioxide — both climate-warming gases — into the atmosphere.

Jaden led the monitors back to higher ground and crept toward the edge of the thaw slump.

“Billy, can I go and take a look?” he asked Mr. Dillon without stopping.

The permafrost had disappeared under the slump’s edge. Only a layer of tundra projected into the air and could have easily collapsed under Jaden’s weight.

“Billy, did you see where I was standing? Did you see the overhang?”

Later, his excitement subsided, Jaden was still unsure of the significance of what he had seen. Did he worry about having to leave Tuktoyaktuk?

“I don’t know, not really, kind of,” he said, then added, “Maybe as I get older, I might.”

Jaden was in 10th grade and worked as a monitor so that he could save for a snowmobile. His boss had been monitoring the land for three decades. Mr. Dillon did not think Tuktoyaktuk would disappear in his lifetime, but he was certain it would in Jaden’s.

“Nobody really wants to take the responsibility for saying we have to move,” Mr. Dillon said, adding, “But the whole hamlet will be relocated.”

A Quarter of the World’s Permafrost

Only a couple of decades ago, people burying loved ones in Tuktoyaktuk’s cemetery first had to light a fire. When enough of the permafrost just beneath the tundra had melted, a grave would be deep enough and a body could be laid to rest.

Nowadays, in some corners of the cemetery, probes are too short to find the permafrost. Along a deep fissure running across the cemetery, gravesites have caved in and crosses lean in the same direction like dominoes ready to topple over. Families had filled other gravesites with gravel to save them.

“If I ever become a billionaire, my family’s moving with me,” Mr. Dillon said, near a cross bearing the name of Eddie Tex Dillon, an older brother who had served as a mayor of the hamlet. “Go find some solid granite to bury my people in.”

The fate of the cemetery is one of the most sensitive issues to locals.

“We don’t ever relocate a cemetery in our Inuvialuit culture,” said Erwin Elias, Tuktoyaktuk’s mayor. “But we don’t want kids to be seeing coffins floating out into the ocean.”

Mr. Dillon and his team regularly check the land behind the cemetery, which is exposed to the Arctic Ocean. Boulders placed along the shoreline there failed to save a handful of houses from having to be moved in 2020.

“There was one kid in my class — his name is Bob,” said Jaden. “There was a white house right at the end, and he used to live there.”

About 1,000 people live in Tuktoyaktuk, a community that grew during the Cold War as a station for a continentwide anti-Soviet radar system. Mr. Dillon, whose parents were employed at several stations, worked for a Canadian oil company when Tuktoyaktuk became a hub for exploration in the Western Arctic in the 1970s. Now Tuktoyaktuk has become a hot spot for global permafrost research.

A decrease in sea ice because of warming weather has contributed to the Arctic’s heating up four times as fast as the global average in the past four decades, making the region one of the hardest hit by climate change. Warmer temperatures have caused the thawing of the Earth’s permafrost — ice mixed with soil, sand and organic matter that has been continuously frozen, some for hundreds of thousands of year.

Canada has about a quarter of the world’s permafrost — the most after Russia — and in its Western Arctic, thaw slumps have increased in recent years, said Dustin Whalen, a Canadian government physical scientist who began researching in the region two decades ago.

Back then, thaw slumps were limited to areas most susceptible to warming, Mr. Whalen said. “Now they seem to be everywhere.”

Mr. Whalen helped start the monitoring program in 2019, training Mr. Dillon and other Inuvialuit. No other community keeps such close track of the permafrost, providing continuous data to scientists, Mr. Whalen said. But now other experts from all over the world have gravitated to the hamlet.

“We really have very little understanding of half of the world’s permafrost, which is in Russia, other than what we can glean from satellites,” said Christopher Burn, a permafrost expert at Carleton University in Ottawa and former president of the International Permafrost Association.

But Tuktoyaktuk is a window. “What is happening there is being replicated around the Arctic,” Mr. Burn said.

At this point, the climate-warming gases discharged by degrading permafrost are believed to be offset by the concomitant growth of vegetation that absorbs carbon, Mr. Burn said. But scientists believe that in the next 10 to 15 years, if climate change stays on its current trajectory, the permafrost regions will become net emitters of greenhouse gases, he said.

“By the end of the century,” Mr. Burn said, “we will have emissions from permafrost that are equivalent to the third or fourth most-emitting country in the world.”

‘It Will Go’

Mr. Dillon didn’t need to open his yellow notebook to remember when he first noticed a startling site outside a red house perched on a promontory jutting into Tuktoyaktuk’s inland harbor, the one protected by a shrinking barrier island.

“Aug. 16, 2023 — this is when we first noticed it,” he said.

Under the house, the thawing permafrost revealed — alarmingly — that the building rested mostly on sand. The adjoining land was scarred with telltale fissures and parts of the shoreline were slumping into the water. The monitors now visit the red house regularly to record the transformation.

Calvin Pokiak came out of his house and stood on his front porch, next to a large cross and a blue angel on his home’s facade. A wheelbarrow, a satellite dish, a barbecue grill, a Spiderman swimming kickboard and other items formed a makeshift wall around the back of his house — to prevent his grandchildren from wandering onto the unstable ground.

“Once you expose that permafrost back there, it’s going to erode so fast that you wouldn’t even know what could happen,” Mr. Pokiak, 69, said, adding that everything around him appeared to be sinking.

“I’ll have a Pokiak Island,” he added with a burst of laughter.

Mr. Dillon had known Mr. Pokiak long enough to understand that his laughter hid extreme anxiety. Both men had been classmates at an Anglican residential school, and as adults Mr. Pokiak had been Mr. Dillon’s boss at the Inuvialuit Land Administration, a regional organization that manages land owned by the Inuvialuit people. Mr. Dillon had worked as an environmental monitor there for 27 years.

Like others in town, Mr. Pokiak didn’t want to leave. He built his house three decades ago, and his two brothers erected their own houses nearby, and they called the area “Pokesville.” As the two men sat at his kitchen table, he pressed Mr. Dillon for information on how bad the permafrost was.

“Those two sloping sites, they’re moving downward,” Mr. Dillon told Mr. Pokiak. “And if those two are moving, this is moving as well, Calvin.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Pokiak said, adding after a long pause, “I mean, personally, I think I was happy I moved out here. I mean, I couldn’t be any happier than where I am right now.”

He went on, “But now that William and these guys are doing all of these measurements and studies, if I have to move my house, I would do it.”

“Here’s the other thing I’ve learned, Calvin,” Mr. Dillon said. “Your house and your brother Ernest’s house are both sitting on sand, and there’s hardly any permafrost left in that sand.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Pokiak said.

“You’re sliding, and that’s why you’re sloping in the back,” Mr. Dillon said. “All that sand is going to come out — and it will go.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Pokiak said.

“No if’s, no but’s, it will go.”

“That’s why, like I said,” Mr. Pokiak said, “I’m very careful about who goes behind my house.”

“Once that is gone,” Mr. Pokiak said about the permafrost, before erupting in laughter — “I’m going to have to put my house on pontoons.”

Buying Time

Tuktoyaktuk relocated a tiny slice of itself in 2020.

On one day in April, three houses at risk of falling into the ocean near the tip of the peninsula were moved on an ice road to their new home, not far from Mr. Pokiak’s red house.

They were lowered next to one another onto flat gravel surfaces that have become what Mr. Dillon described as a “roller coaster,” evidence of the permafrost’s relentless thawing.

The move, Mr. Elias, the town’s mayor, said had been “a rush thing” and the lots were so small that there was no room for shifting.

Mr. Elias described other planned projects, including the installation of more large rocks along the shoreline and in front of a barrier island, a $54 million project financed by the federal government.

The work, he acknowledged without prodding, was Sisyphean. “The thing is you can’t just up and leave. So this will sustain us for the next 20, 30 years. It’ll buy us time to come up with a plan to relocate.”

For now, few in Tuktoyaktuk were ready to accept the town’s inevitable fate — not even Shayne Cockney, who lived with her two children in one of three houses that had been relocated.

Her house — a squat yellow box under a triangle-shaped roof — now rests on a dozen four-legged jacks. When the ground shifts, the height of certain jacks is adjusted to prevent the house from leaning too much in one direction.

When she hired a contractor over the summer, one side of the house was four inches lower than the other. The shifting has caused cracks in her walls and warping in her window frames, allowing freezing winter air to seep in. Chimes hanging from the ceiling next to her kitchen clinked when strong winds rattled her house.

Ms. Cockney, 33, had grown up in the house. She had left the hamlet to study, but returned to live in the house and to take care of her grandmother, who died during the pandemic.

“It’s been really scary because we were so uneven,” Ms. Cockney said sitting at her kitchen table. “I’m hoping that this year it is a little bit more sturdy now that the ground is,” she paused and looked at Mr. Dillon, “more settled?”

Mr. Dillon, who had been quiet, finally told her the ground under her would never settle.

“Your best choice would be to move,” he said.

“Re-move?”

“Re-move.”

“But where?”

“That’s exactly,” Mr. Dillon said, “everybody’s question.”

The wartime economy that Russia spurred into overdrive is slowing, causing tensions among the country’s economic elites as the war with Ukraine approaches its fourth year.

Many Russian civilian industries have stopped growing, and some had even gone into decline by October, according to the latest official data. The country’s currency, the ruble, dropped to its weakest level in two years last week, and businesses say they are struggling to get new loans or get paid by clients.

The central bank sharply raised the country’s benchmark interest rate in October to 21 percent, the highest since the end of the Soviet Union, in an attempt to dampen inflation.

Last month, the central bank also lowered its forecast for Russia’s economic growth next year to 0.5 to 1.5 percent, compared with 3.5 to 4 percent this year. The slowdown comes even as the government continues to pump record amounts of money into the economy to finance the war.

The combination of rising prices and falling economic activity has led some economists and officials to warn that the Russian economy is moving toward stagflation, a quagmire where prices rise quickly without growth.

Western nations have subjected Russia over the last three years to some of the strictest economic sanctions in modern history to punish President Vladimir V. Putin for his invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s slowing growth and rising inflation, economists say, show that the sanctions are having an impact, putting a dent in the stimulating effect that the Kremlin’s enormous wartime spending has had on the economy, they say.

Civilian companies are particularly feeling the pinch. The Russian Railways, the country’s largest employer, which transports a large share of the nation’s goods and passengers, reported its freight volume fell almost 9 percent in October compared with a year ago. To compensate for falling demand, the company is raising prices more than 10 percent in December, and trimming planned investment for 2025 by a third.

Still, the data suggests that the economic strains are still far from provoking the kind of crisis that might compel Mr. Putin to curtail his ambitions in Ukraine.

The immediate casualty of the recent downturn could become Russia’s central bank, arguably the last state entity in the country that has operated somewhat independently from the Kremlin.

There are rising tensions between Russia’s industrialists and the bank over the cost of borrowing that could have far-reaching consequences, including what type of economy Russia will inherit after the war.

The disagreements have emerged in public speeches and economic reports, part of a delicate dance around the elephant in the war room: the inability to blame the war for the slowdown, which would risk Mr. Putin’s ire.

Instead, Russia’s economic elites are blaming technical policy decisions, and one another, exposing the tensions behind a facade of wartime unity.

Industrialists and allied officials have directed their complaints at the central bank’s chief, Elvira Nabiullina, accusing her of suffocating the economy with record interest rates.

Ms. Nabiullina has forcefully defended her monetary shock therapy, arguing it is necessary to reduce the 9 percent annual inflation by half next year and ensure long-term economic stability.

“It is clear that if you’re an entrepreneur in Russia who doesn’t make, say, ballistic missiles, then you’re having a tough time,” said Alexander Kolyandr, a Russian economy expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “But because you cannot fight the root cause, you fight the symptoms.”

Mr. Putin for years gave Ms. Nabiullina an unusual degree of autonomy to keep the Russian economy stable. But now, as the economic pressures of the war multiply, her tactics are being criticized by a loud chorus of the country’s industrialists, business associations and economists close to the government.

Even Mikhail Mishustin, Russia’s prime minister and Mr. Putin’s chief economic enforcer, took a rare swipe at the central bank in November, blaming high interest rates for falling investment.

Economists from a Moscow-based research organization added their voice to the criticism. “Because of the actions of the central bank, the Russian economy is practically facing the threat of stagflation,” the organization, called the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-term Forecasting, wrote in a November report.

The group added that nearly one in two Russian companies now say that problems obtaining loans are stifling their growth.

The report’s strong language created waves among the Russian elites, because the wonkily named group is run by Dmitri Belousov, the brother of Andrei Belousov, the powerful defense minister and longtime former economic adviser to Mr. Putin. The report was interpreted by some as a sign of Ms. Nabiullina’s waning support from Mr. Putin.

Another attack came from the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, a pro-government association of large companies known by its Russian acronym, R.S.P.P.

The organization said that 36 percent of its members had reported being unable to collect payments from clients in the third quarter of this year, up 14 percentage points from a year ago. They blamed high interest rates.

Then, in an internal report leaked to the Russian news media, R.S.P.P. made an unusual request for the central bank to coordinate its monetary policy with the government, a direct attack on the central bank’s independence. R.S.P.P. has since distanced itself from the report, but the leak nonetheless led Ms. Nabiullina to defend her policy in a forceful speech to the Russian Parliament.

“Today we are finding ourselves for the first time in a situation where practically all resources in the economy are being utilized,” she told lawmakers in November, implying limited scope for further growth. “Calls to postpone the lowering of inflation are based on an argument that today microeconomic stability is less important, that it can be compromised in favor of a forced economic jump.”

“I am convinced that it’s the reverse — today we must value stability as never before,” she added.

The central bank’s reports have painted an increasingly downbeat economic outlook.

The value of payments received by companies, a barometer of economic activity, fell 2.9 percent in October compared with the average in the previous three months, according to the central bank. The slowdown was particularly pronounced in sectors without direct connection to the military, such as education, construction, and oil and gas production.

“The only things that grow at meaningful rate are those related to war,” said Mr. Kolyandr.

The warning signs are flashing elsewhere.

New American sanctions on Russian banks in November have contributed to a large decline in the value of the ruble. The ruble fell to 109 against the dollar on Friday, its weakest rate since March 2022.

The ruble’s decline means that Russian companies must pay more for foreign goods, feeding inflation and weakening the effectiveness of Ms. Nabiullina’s interest rate shock therapy, said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin and a former official at the Russian central bank.

To be sure, economists say the Russian economy will not collapse in the foreseeable future. Wages continue outstripping inflation, raising the standard of living of ordinary Russians and denting the impact of the slowdown on the population, according to the Center for Analysis and Strategies in Europe, or CASE, a Cyprus-based group of opposition Russian economists.

Real wages in Russia grew nearly 18 percent since the start of the war, reversing a seven-year decline, the economists said in a recent report.

Inflation, although stubborn, remains in the single digits, and the Kremlin maintains ample means to finance the war, the CASE economists said. The Russian government is raising taxes on companies and wealthy individuals and is tapping into its sovereign wealth fund. The government’s low debt burden — about 18 percent of economic output — means it has ample room to keep borrowing from Russian banks.

The battle over Russian interest rates underlines longer-term economic tensions, said Ms. Prokopenko.

The Kremlin’s seemingly endless war has persuaded Russian business elites to seek short-term profit in an overheated economy over long-term investment. The growing calls for cheap money now threaten to dismantle a system of economic checks and balances that have kept the Russian economy stable over most of Mr. Putin’s rule, Ms. Prokopenko added.

“If a warring nation can’t present to its people an idea of a bright future, then it makes sense to stuff yourself while the party lasts,” she said. “You may not have that chance later.”

Oleg Matsnev contributed research.

Prime Minister Michel Barnier of France pushed a budget bill through the lower house of Parliament without a vote on Monday — a risky move that sets the stage for a no-confidence motion this week that could topple the government.

The prospect of a government collapse — and of a failure to pass a budget — has rattled financial markets, sharply increased France’s borrowing costs, and further deepened the uncertainty that has gripped the country since snap elections last summer yielded no clear parliamentary majority.

“I don’t think the French would forgive us for putting individual interests ahead of the nation’s future,” Mr. Barnier told lawmakers shortly before invoking a constitutional tool that allows him to push a bill through the lower house without a vote. “French people are calling for and expecting stability.”

But the move exposes his government to no-confidence motions — which both French left-wing parties and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party quickly said they would file, with a vote expected as early as Wednesday.

The fate of Mr. Barnier and of his cabinet, both appointed by President Emmanuel Macron just three months ago, now rests in their hands.

Mr. Macron, whose term runs until the spring of 2027, will remain as president even if Mr. Barnier and his cabinet fall. But Mr. Macron will need to appoint a new prime minister.

Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Barnier, a veteran center-right politician, have engaged in a game of chicken over the past week. Ms. Le Pen dangled the threat of a no-confidence motion ever more vocally if Mr. Barnier did not accede to her demands on the budget. Mr. Barnier warned of “serious turbulence on the financial markets” and the troubles ahead if the country reaches the new year without a budget — warnings that Ms. Le Pen has dismissed as fear-mongering and “fake news.”

Mr. Barnier made some concessions, announcing that he was scrapping a hike in electricity taxes and reducing health care coverage for undocumented people. On Monday, just hours before a potential vote, Mr. Barnier made another gesture to Ms. Le Pen by promising that the government would not reduce medication reimbursements.

Mathilde Panot, a top lawmaker for the left-wing France Unbowed party, told reporters at the lower house that Mr. Barnier “tried to escape censure by wallowing in dishonor with the National Rally,” referring to the French term for a no-confidence vote.

“This Wednesday,” she added, “he’ll have both dishonor and censure.”

Ms. Le Pen confirmed her party was planning on voting against the government, after Mr. Barnier hadn’t responded enough to her party’s demands. “Mr. Barnier didn’t want to respond to our 11 million voters. So everyone must shoulder their responsibilities,” she told reporters Wednesday afternoon.

All the uncertainty has caused widespread anxiety.

“We won’t have a budget, we won’t have a government — there is no sense of the day after,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist in Paris. “We have no idea what will happen.”

Many believed this was the inevitable outcome of last summer’s snap election, which resulted in a bitterly fragmented National Assembly, France’s lower house of Parliament. No party or bloc was even close to having a majority. Instead, the house is divided into three main blocs: the anti-immigrant, nationalist National Rally and its allies; the alliance of four left-wing parties called the New Popular Front; and a tenuous coalition of centrists and conservatives who support Mr. Barnier.

Mr. Barnier was appointed by Mr. Macron in an attempt to break the deadlock that has gripped the lower house since the snap elections. But the move infuriated the New Popular Front, which has the most seats and is deeply opposed to the government’s economic policies.

The left has vowed to topple Mr. Barnier’s government, but it needs the far-right’s votes to do so.

Without enough votes to get bills through parliament on its own, Mr. Barnier’s government has been forced to rely on the tacit support of the far right. But it has not wanted to cede too much either, since many government members were elected to block the far right from gaining power, Benjamin Morel, a lecturer in public law at Panthéon-Assas University in Paris, said.

“This blockage is not so much about the measures, which were expected, particularly on electricity. It’s really about symbolism,” said Mr. Morel. “But that symbolism has profoundly important electoral impacts.”

The budget was the government’s first major test. To add to the pressure, France already has one of the highest ratios of debt to economic output in the euro area, as well as a spiraling deficit that has provoked a reprimand from the European Union. In response, Mr. Barnier was tasked with cutting the budget by 60 billion euros ($63 billion), using a mix of public spending cuts and raising taxes — both highly unpopular in France.

According to recent polls, the majority of French public opinion is opposed to passing an austerity budget requiring spending cuts and increased taxes, and a small majority wants the Barnier government to fall.

Mr. Barnier could have let Monday’s bill go to a vote, and it would have continued the legislative process. But the government is facing a constitutionally mandated deadline to finalize the budget by the end of the year, and the political deadlock in the lower house is not expected to end anytime soon — meaning he has few other options than to force it through.

To do so, Mr. Barnier invoked Article 49.3 of France’s Constitution to push through the legislation — a social security spending bill.

It was the first of three budget bills that could lead to the government’s falling. A second, smaller bill adjusting 2024 finances is expected to be voted on later this week. Finally, the main government budget for 2025 is expected to come to a vote around Dec. 20.

In each case, the entrenched political deadlock in the National Assembly raises the same perilous specter — the repeated use of Article 49.3, creating a crescendo of no-confidence votes for the government over the coming weeks.

Using Article 49.3 gives opposition lawmakers 24 hours to file a no-confidence motion against the government. Then, the motion would be put to a vote within days. If an absolute majority of lawmakers in the lower house supports the motion, Mr. Barnier and his cabinet would have to resign, and Mr. Macron would have to appoint a new prime minister.

Under the Constitution, Mr. Macron cannot dissolve the assembly and call new legislative elections before July 2025.

Cristina Nambendi receives training on farming techniques from an American-funded program in Angola. But when asked if she had ever heard of President Biden or knew much about the United States, she looked stumped.

When asked about China, however, her eyes lit up.

“What I hear and what I see is that they are building tall buildings and houses, and they are selling stuff,” said Ms. Nambendi, 47, who has been farming corn and beans for more than two decades in this southern African nation.

Mr. Biden visits Angola on Monday in his only trip to Africa as president and what is scheduled to be his last foreign trip in office. He will be there to promote the Lobito Corridor, an 800-mile railway project funded in part by the United States that is meant to be his signature initiative on the continent and an answer to China’s outsize influence across many African nations.

United States officials say the corridor will encourage private investment in Angola and provide the West with better access to minerals necessary for electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies. Yet China has already spent decades funding projects in the country and around the continent, leaving some to wonder whether America can compete with its rival.

Beijing has built ostentatious shopping malls and roads with Chinese logos and signs. Angolans say the Chinese have made life easier and created jobs. Rather than funding such development projects, the United States has sought to create conditions that will attract private investment, though there’s no telling how long that will take or when Angolans might see the benefits. Some are skeptical those benefits will come at all.

“What is real is real,” said Edu Xiong, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Luanda, the capital. “To speak loudly is easy, but to make it real is another thing. Some people are talking about this corridor. ‘We will hire a lot of people.’ But we have not seen that.”

Angola is the second largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa. When it emerged from a devastating civil war in 2002, the government knocked on the doors of wealthy nations to ask for help rebuilding. America said no. China said yes. Angolans remember that.

Thus far, America’s only significant economic investment in the country has been in its oil and gas industries. Those who are critical of the corridor say oil and gas remain America’s true interest.

The election of Donald J. Trump has deepened uncertainty about how the United States will engage here, and there is no shortage of skepticism about what America is really after.

“Sometimes they say, ‘We do care about agriculture as well,’” Beto Pinheiro, a 48-year-old farmer in the coastal city of Benguela, said of American officials. “But at the end of the day, it’s only petrol and minerals.”

Despite the skepticism among Angolans, the country’s president, João Lourenço, has bullishly pivoted toward the United States in recent years, in some cases spurning traditional allies like China and Russia to do so.

Since Mr. Lourenço took office in 2017, he has met with Mr. Biden twice. Rather than selecting a Chinese company to oversee the Lobito railway, his government chose a consortium of European companies, even though it was China that rebuilt the century-old rail line after the Angolan civil war. Mr. Lourenço has also turned to the United States to help modernize his country’s aging military, which has historically been aligned with Russia.

Many Angolans still harbor resentment toward the United States for not supporting its fight against Portuguese colonizers. The United States also supported the opponents of Angola’s largest anticolonial movement, which had embraced communism, during the civil war that came after independence in 1975.

Mr. Lourenço, in an interview, said Angola should be more like Japan or Vietnam, countries that were once at war with the United States but had moved on and now welcomed American investment.

“Angola also could be one more of those countries that have turned the page,” he said. “We joined the market economy, and today there is no country in the world that has joined the market economy without having good relations with the U.S.”

Critics have argued that the Lobito Corridor is another example of foreign powers stripping African nations of their resources. The line runs from Angola’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to the port city of Lobito, on the Atlantic Ocean. From there, minerals can be more easily shipped to the United States, Europe and other countries.

China is far ahead of the United States in its access to critical minerals in Africa. But the corridor could reduce that advantage, which may appeal to Mr. Trump, said J. Peter Pham, an Africa policy expert who worked in the first Trump administration.

“It’s in no one’s interest that any one country lock up the supply chain,” Mr. Pham said. “If you want to make America great again and rebuild the industrial base, you’re not going to do that without critical minerals.”

Mr. Biden has pitched the corridor as a catalyst that will help Angola diversify its economy. It will entice manufacturers to build factories along the railway because they can use it to ship goods, U.S. officials say. And it won’t bury the country in debt. (Since 2002, Angola has accumulated more than $42 billion in Chinese debt, more than any other African nation.)

U.S. officials say the corridor could allow small, subsistence farmers to ship their harvests overseas, rather than selling them at roadside markets as most currently do. The United States has also introduced programs that teach agricultural best practices, like the one helping Ms. Nambendi in Cubal, a village that the Lobito railway cuts through.

Women in the program said they had learned how to produce their own fertilizer and properly space seeds when planting. They were also taught to read and write so they could run a business.

Ms. Nambendi, a mother of seven, said she earned so much in her first harvest since joining the program that she was able to buy a goat, invest in her modest house constructed from mud blocks and build an outdoor, wood-burning oven to support her other business, baking bread.

These are small inroads that American officials hope will add up.

It’s important that Angolans understand these U.S.-backed initiatives are supporting them, said William Butterfield, the representative to Angola of the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the program.

“It helps us create the good will that’s necessary to do a lot of our other business,” such as trade and defense, he said.

Some Angolans are starting to take note.

Antonio Andrade, the deputy administrator for Cubal, stood on the farm where the women received their training, envisioning a future in which America’s efforts led to neat rows of crops resembling large commercial farms, factories that produce fruit juice and corn flour and slaughterhouses for cattle.

“America has a name to protect,” he said. “They don’t just go for quick profit.”

Along Via Expressa, a busy highway that cuts through Luanda, billboards with Chinese characters advertise Beijing’s presence. “Tough world, tough equipment,” read an ad for LiuGong heavy machinery. China City, a massive, open-air mall, occupies several blocks along the highway.

But with economic challenges at home, China has decreased its investment in Africa in recent years. Many African nations are also less willing to take on more Chinese debt. Private Chinese entrepreneurs are turning to industries like green energy, mining and manufacturing. Some also say they, too, could reap the benefits of the Lobito Corridor.

“This Lobito project is a very good project for Angola’s development,” said Zheng Gang, a Chinese entrepreneur who has been doing business in Angola for 18 years. “Angola’s economy grows, which means that we will have more opportunities.”

Gilberto Neto contributed reporting.