The hillsides surrounding the harbor of the tiny French territory of Mayotte have been transformed into barren mounds of leafless, uprooted trees. Sailboats lie on their sides, consumed by the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

Piles of twisted metal, bricks, insulation and other debris line the steep, narrow streets of Mamoudzou, the capital of this archipelago along the east coast of Africa. Amid all this destruction caused by Cyclone Chido, which struck last weekend, a few residents sat on the sidewalk in a downpour on Thursday, setting out buckets to capture water, which has become a valuable commodity with taps dry since the storm.

“Tell Macron that God gave us water,” said a shirtless man, raising his arms, referring to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who had just arrived to tour the devastation.

As residents pick through the wreckage where dozens have been confirmed dead and thousands may be missing, the deeply impoverished territory of Mayotte is attracting rare global attention and generating renewed debate over its treatment as part of France.

More than a century and a half after France colonized Mayotte, which mainly comprises two larger islands and a series of smaller ones with about 320,000 people, it is the poorest place in France and faces some of the greatest social challenges.

The poverty rate in Mayotte is nearly 80 percent, five times higher than on the mainland, according to official statistics. The unemployment rate is nearly 40 percent, compared with about 7 percent for the rest of France. Some people work in fishing and agriculture, or in an informal economy of small shops and businesses; others are employed by the state.

About 30 percent of residents do not have access to running water at home, a problem made worse by a drought last year. Some aid workers and analysts have said the government has failed to keep up with a rapidly growing population and provide necessary services. Others suggest that the government has largely overlooked the island, which sits some 5,000 miles away from mainland France and is a 12-hour flight from Paris.

In the aftermath of the cyclone, Mr. Macron has vowed to support the devastated population.

At the airport and then at the hospital on Thursday, Mr. Macron was greeted by scores of worried residents and exhausted doctors who told him about destroyed homes, power blackouts, low food and medicine stocks, empty gas stations — and worries of a terrible toll.

Mr. Macron, who wore a white shirt and a traditional local scarf, was also taken on a helicopter flyover of the devastation. He repeatedly promised that relief was arriving and said that a field hospital would be operational on Friday.

For some people living in Mayotte, all the attention and talk of camaraderie coming from mainland France — and Mr. Macron’s visit — ring hollow after what they see as decades of discrimination and being cast aside like neglected stepchildren.

“It’s not going to do anything for us,” said Sarah Moilimo, 35, a teacher who is now accommodating about 25 people who lost their homes in her house in Mamoudzou, referring to Mr. Macron’s visit. “What we need is for him to act and to do something,” she added. “Over the last few months he’s sent many ministers to visit Mayotte and nothing ever changes.”

Mr. Macron rejected suggestions that the French state had abandoned Mayotte and made sweeping promises of recovery during his visit. “We were able to rebuild our cathedral in five years,” Mr. Macron said, referring to the recent reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. “It would be a tragedy if we were unable to rebuild Mayotte.”

Even though Mayotte is a part of France, its inhabitants do not enjoy all the same benefits as mainland residents, and they are subject to some different laws.

In Mayotte, families are not entitled to certain grants for child birth and education that are accessible almost everywhere else in France.

Mayotte is one of only two French departments, the basic administrative units within regions, where state representatives can remove residents and destroy illegal housing without a court order. Although the law requires the government to provide suitable alternative accommodation, that often does not happen, according to aid groups.

The shantytowns that have been the focus of the local government’s demolition efforts have taken the hardest hit from the storm, with many wiped away. Many residents of the shantytowns are believed to be undocumented migrants.

At a shantytown on a hill in the Passamaïnty neighborhood, not a single tree remained intact, the ones still standing all ravaged by the storm. The muddy slope was littered with a castaway car door, soaked mattresses and a dented headboard.

The banging of hammers echoed from the detritus, as displaced residents were already trying to move forward. One of them, a 38-year-old immigrant from Comoros named Abdouswali, stood on a long sheet of red corrugated iron that was once the roof of a nearby hotel, hammering out the kinks to build a new shack after the cyclone destroyed his old one.

The unemployed father of four, who asked to be identified only by his first name because he is undocumented, migrated from the neighboring nation of Comoros in 2014 to find work. The best he could do was the occasional construction job, he said. Without money to move into a more stable situation, he forged ahead on a new home, undeterred by the rubble all around him.

“We have no other choice,” he shrugged. “There is no space to build.”

The disparities that Mayotte faces are in some ways a legacy of the French colonial era.

Colonized in 1843, Mayotte only became a French department — which establishes a local authority to administer social services and infrastructure — in 2011. It’s the youngest department in the country, and some civil society activists say government officials are still struggling to catch the island up on services and infrastructure amid rapid population growth.

Ms. Moilimo, the teacher in Mamoudzou, said she moved to Mayotte about a year and a half ago after living in Marseille her entire life because she wanted to connect with her roots in Africa. She figured Mayotte would be a good landing spot because she could still have the salary and quality of life she had in France.

“It’s not like France at all,” she said, saying the disparities between Mayotte and the mainland were startling.

Even though salaries are much lower in Mayotte, prices are much higher, she said. The education system in Mayotte is so overwhelmed, she said, that many pupils perform far below their grade level. Some students only have the opportunity to go to school for half of the day because of a shortage of teachers.

Thanks in part to pro-French female activists who used what is known as tickle torture as a way to scare off pro-independence politicians, Mayotte was the only territory in its island chain that voted to remain a part of France during a referendum in the mid-1970s. That led to its separation from what is today the independent nation of Comoros.

Today, many Mayotte residents continue to hold a strong allegiance to France, even when they feel the government has failed them, Ms. Moilimo said.

“It’s like the people of Mayotte have the syndrome of the colonized,” she said. “They’re so happy to be considered French that they’ll settle for anything you give them.”

Part of the reason that Mayotte may have lost so many lives is that cyclones are so rare there that residents often are not aware of the proper precautions to take, said Eric Sam-Vah, the deputy head of the Piroi Center, a disaster management agency of the French Red Cross.

Even though French authorities have warned of a high death toll, residents have complained that government rescue and recovery efforts have been sluggish, and in some cases nonexistent. There was no sign of a government rescue effort during a walk Thursday through many stricken areas of the capital.

During his visit, Mr. Macron acknowledged that in many shantytowns there had not yet been searches to find victims, injured and dead, but said officials were ramping up efforts to find victims in these communities.

In many cases, Mayotte residents have had to turn to each other to survive.

After the roof of his two-story, detached villa was torn off by the cyclone, Mickael Damour, 47, was forced to squeeze into a bathroom cupboard to stay safe. He emerged to roads so clogged with debris that he and his neighbors could not leave and were forced to shelter in a school. Mr. Damour, a dialysis nurse, said he put his professional skills to work, treating neighbors who could not get to the hospital.

“I bandaged wounds for two days, nonstop,” he said. “We don’t see a lot of aid from the French state.”

Aurelien Breeden reported from Paris.

Members of the family ducked under an empty doorway and stepped over the rubble from their home.

“It’s shocking, really shocking,” said Abdulrahman Alama, 37, as he stared at the damaged building. A refugee in Lebanon for 13 years since the start of Syria’s civil war, he had returned to Homs and was visiting the family home with his sister and another relative just a week after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. Any joy was tempered by the sight.

“I don’t want to send a photo to my father because it is too shocking,” he said.

Days after the lightning-fast rebel offensive that ousted Mr. al-Assad, Syrians are going back home by the thousands, among them refugees, the internally displaced and detainees emerging from prisons. And residents are shaking off the terror of living under dictatorship.

In Homs, people were reacting with both smiles and tears, thanking God and frequently cursing their former president.

Much of Syria was devastated by Mr. al-Assad’s brutal fight to suppress a popular uprising and hold on to power. Homs, an ancient city in central Syria where protesters were the first to take up weapons in 2011 against his oppression, became a center of resistance.

Warplanes bombed the city. Neighborhoods were sealed off and the population starved and battered into surrender. Hundreds of people were killed as the Assad regime besieged parts of the city for three years. Even after the attacks stopped, intense repression remained in place.

Years after the bombardment, there are still scenes of indescribable dereliction. Whole districts are bomb sites, where ravaged buildings stretch for block after block. Walls are scarred with shrapnel, collapsed roofs tilt at dangerous angles, and mounds of rubble fill the sidewalks.

“Complete destruction,” said Mr. Alama, gesturing at his ruined neighborhood, Baba Amr, “and then God destroyed Assad.”

Tragedy touched nearly every family in Homs during the brutal Assad campaign.

The people of Homs turned out for peaceful protests in the spring of 2011, joining the call for justice that was rippling through the Arab world. They were cautious at first, aware of how the former president, Hafez al-Assad — Bashar al-Assad’s father — had crushed a 1982 rebellion in the nearby city of Hama, killing thousands of civilians in one of the bloodiest episodes in recent Middle Eastern history.

But as the Assad regime used lethal force, clashes increasingly broke out, and within months a full-blown armed rebellion was underway. Baba Amr became an opposition-held area until February 2012, when Mr. al-Assad sent in security forces to crack down.

Rabia Asad, a truck driver, had moved out of Baba Amr, but was helping families flee from the city, he said. People scrambled through the sewer system to escape the onslaught but hundreds were killed and their houses burned at the end of the monthlong assault on the neighborhood, he said.

“Assad had us up to the neck,” he said.

Rebel fighters occupied the houses and the Assad army shelled the neighborhood with heavy artillery, said Mahmoud al-Shater, 23, whose house, next door to Mr. Alama’s, was smashed. Mr. al-Shater was just 10 at the time his family took refuge outside the city.

Mr. al-Shater’s father, Abdul Moler al-Shater, a construction worker, disappeared after the police stopped him and a driver at a checkpoint in the city in 2013.

“If someone falls in the hands of the government, they die or starve to death,” his mother, Hannah, 51, said. She never learned what happened to her husband and asked that only her first name be published for fear of repercussions. “Maybe Assad will come back,” she said.

A year after her husband disappeared, a stray bullet killed her 8-year-old son, Mr. al-Shater’s younger brother, striking him in the head as he stood in the courtyard of their house. Police officers came to investigate, but Hannah said she refused to talk to them because she was grieving and she never learned the results of their investigation.

She lived off donations, raising her two remaining sons on her own, moving house several times as the fighting shifted.

Over three long years, the government besieged one district after another, sealing off neighborhoods and starving the population and fighters into surrender. The ferocity of the fighting increased, with warplanes attacking even the old city, with its black basalt walls and covered markets, and the ancient Christian quarter.

Survivors and fighters were eventually evacuated in buses arranged by the United Nations to rebel-held areas in northern Syria.

An entire generation of young men fled the country to avoid arrest or enlistment into the Syrian Army.

Diaa al-Shaami, 23, was barely a teenager when his two elder brothers went abroad. Eventually, things quieted, and he began studies in trade and accounting and started a coffee shop to make ends meet.

Interviewed between serving customers, he flashed a smile of happiness. There had been a constant fear of arbitrary arrest, for saying the wrong thing or just while walking in the street, he said. Plainclothes security police, known as Shabiha, would demand a free daily coffee from him and helped themselves to packs of cigarettes in his shop, he said, abusing him if he dared to ask for payment.

Tamam Kara Hussain, 69, who lives alone in one room of his damaged home, the upper floor gaping open to the skies, was tending herbs and onions in boxes on his doorstep. He lost three brothers who were detained at a checkpoint and never seen again. His two sons were away fighting with the rebels, and the rest of the family had fled abroad, he said.

“We just wanted freedom, and he did all this,” he said, cursing Mr. al-Assad. “But they will come back,” he said of the people who had fled. “It’s our land.”

Homs was already busy again. Refugees were arriving on buses from Lebanon every day, cramming into cars and minibuses to travel the last leg to their homes.

Jihad al-Surur, 50, a local businessman, was directing a bulldozer to clear concrete blocks and rubble that the Assad army had placed in piles as rudimentary defenses as the rebels approached Homs this month.

Mr. al-Surur said he was donating his machines and workers to help open up the roads and collect garbage: “It’s a mission.”

Mr. al-Assad’s government had done little to repair the damaged city in 14 years, he said. “He did not do anything for his people,” he said.

Syrians all over the city stopped a reporter to send a message to the outside world.

“We need everything, water, electricity, wood, connection,” said Mufid al-Swabe, 40, a teacher of English literature, stopping his motorbike to ask that his message be passed on.

Amid the suffering, there were brave smiles.

“It’s bitter and sweet,” said Maria al-Amin, 45. She said she had found her brother’s name among thousands listed as dead at the notorious Sednaya prison in central Syria.

She said she was happy with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster for her children’s future. Desperately poor, she lives in a half-ruined house with three children and a husband who sells scrap metal that he finds among the ruins. Ms. al-Amin was laying out stale rounds of flat bread on her porch to sell.

“The sadness is inside but not on the outside,” she said.

After joining the Chinese leader Xi Jinping for dinner last year, Mayor London Breed of San Francisco accompanied him to the airport to bid him farewell. There, on the tarmac, she made her request: pandas.

Her city’s zoo was faltering. Tourism was suffering and she faced a tough re-election campaign. A pair of pandas from China would be a political and public relations win.

What ensued were months of informal negotiations, with Ms. Breed — a politician with no foreign affairs or security experience — becoming a diplomat of sorts. She went to China, where she met the vice president and a deputy foreign minister, her calendars and emails show. She traveled with the editor of Sing Tao U.S., a pro-Beijing newspaper that registers as a foreign agent in the United States, according to other records and photographs from the trip.

All of this was organized by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a group that American intelligence officials have concluded seeks to “malignly influence” local leaders. Unlike traveling Washington politicians, Ms. Breed received no C.I.A. briefing about what counterintelligence threats she might face in China and how officials there might try to manipulate her.

If Ms. Breed wanted pandas, China had an interest in the meeting, too — as a way to cultivate a relationship with the mayor of one of America’s most technologically important cities. There is no evidence of any quid pro quo or wrongdoing, but intelligence officials say that China is increasingly looking to wield influence in local governments as its sway in Washington diminishes.

One lever it has, documents and interviews show, is pandas. Chinese officials have sought to use pandas to cultivate relationships, shape policy on Taiwan and soften China’s image abroad, a major goal of Mr. Xi. Panda exchanges provide Chinese leaders with rare, high-profile opportunities to rebrand their country.

This has long been the case. During panda negotiations with Omaha and with Oakland in the mid-2000s, Chinese diplomats tried to scuttle a Nebraskan trade deal with Taiwan and to persuade a California congresswoman to stop criticizing Beijing, negotiators for the American side said. When those efforts failed, China denied pandas to both cities, they said.

But intelligence officials say that China’s outreach is on the rise locally, where officials often do not have the training or intelligence briefings needed to deflect it.

In September, federal prosecutors charged a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York with taking payoffs for securing Chinese influence in Albany. Also this year, a former aide to the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, came under scrutiny after collaborating with groups linked to China’s government.

Local officials in the United States and Europe are also struggling to make sense of a network of unofficial Chinese police outposts that have popped up unexpectedly.

As relations between Beijing and Washington have cooled and high-level delegations have slowed, diplomacy at the local level has taken on increased significance.

“Every mayor wants to have the publicity of getting pandas,” said David Towne, former panda negotiator for American zoos. “Pandas become the bait,” he added.

Pandas are the face of wildlife conservation. Zoos pay about $1 million a year to rent them from China and breed them in captivity, in hopes that pandas will someday be released into the wild. China is supposed to use the money to protect the wild species.

But a New York Times investigation this year revealed that after three decades, China has actually captured more pandas than it has released. And aggressive artificial breeding has injured and even killed pandas. China has steered millions of dollars toward building infrastructure such as apartments and roads as American zoo administrators and regulators looked the other way.

Zoos have an incentive to keep the program running. Pandas bring crowds and merchandise sales. China, too, has a stake in the exchanges.

“Pandas are an interesting piece of the propaganda and influence-seeking puzzle because they’re seemingly innocuous and fuzzy and huggable,” said Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

As Lee Simmons, former director of the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, put it: “Almost every Chinese ambassador was a panda salesman.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not comment on whether Beijing had used pandas to push its political interests. It said that pandas had “promoted people-to-people exchanges between China and the U.S. and enhanced the friendship between the two peoples.” It criticized anyone who “maliciously associated and unreasonably slandered China-U.S. cooperation on giant panda conservation without factual evidence.”

Ms. Breed’s office declined to say whether the mayor had concerns about her trip’s organizers or about the newspaper that is registered as a foreign agent.

“This was a trip designed to boost tourism, which ultimately would benefit San Francisco’s economy,” her office said in a statement.

Ms. Breed announced this spring that two pandas will arrive in San Francisco next year.

Panda Influence

The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries portrays itself as nongovernmental. But it is an arm of the Communist Party, charged with overseeing outreach to foreign local governments.

In 2022, the American director of national intelligence warned statehouses and city halls that China had “stepped up its efforts to cultivate U.S. state and local leaders in a strategy some have described as ‘using the local to surround the central.’” Intelligence officials cited the friendship group as part of that effort.

Mr. Xi has overseen an effort to rebrand his country through overseas propaganda, or what he calls “telling China’s story well.” Under his watch, China has produced a spate of pro-Beijing documentaries and media channels centered on pandas.

In Edinburgh, which until recently was home to pandas, the Chinese government-backed Confucius Institute worked with school officials in the Scottish capital to teach a unit called “Beyond the Panda.” The program included maps showing Taiwan as part of China.

The Chinese friendship group has also organized panda-related events with American politicians and Chinese propaganda officials. The group did not respond to a request to comment.

Pandas are “one of the few tools that China has left for winning public excitement in the U.S. and building soft power,” said Kyle Jaros, an expert on U.S.-China ties at the University of Notre Dame.

‘Chinafornia’

California is home to two Chinese consulates and many people of Chinese descent. The state’s longstanding ties with Beijing, a relationship sometimes called Chinafornia, have yielded positive changes, like cooperation on climate change.

But it has also exposed state and local governments to security risks, experts say.

Before congressional delegations to China, officials typically receive C.I.A. briefings that discuss how Beijing might try to exploit visits, said Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and former C.I.A. official focused on East Asia. Travelers are also warned about cybersecurity risks.

But, Mr. Wilder noted, “At the local level, there’s no mechanism for this.”

In its statement, Ms. Breed’s office said that she had received a briefing from the State Department. Mr. Wilder said that those are less thorough than C.I.A. intelligence briefings.

Across the San Francisco Bay, in Oakland, politicians spent nearly a decade trying to get pandas for the city’s zoo. Henry Chang, a former deputy mayor, said that he had met with a vice premier and several other senior Chinese officials, adding that they had made what he saw as increasingly unreasonable demands.

In a 2008 meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Washington, Mr. Chang said, he brought along Representative Barbara Lee. The meeting was ostensibly about pandas, but an aide pressured Ms. Lee to stop criticizing China’s activities in Africa, Mr. Chang said. Ms. Lee had sponsored a resolution the year before calling on China to use its influence in Sudan to end the genocide there.

“They were more interested to talk to Barbara Lee about the Africa problem than to talk about pandas, to tell you the truth,” he noted.

Ms. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The Oakland Zoo built a $1 million panda enclosure and donated $375,000 to a panda breeding center in Chengdu, southwestern China, Mr. Chang said. The pandas never came.

Officials in Omaha had a similar experience that same year, said Dr. Simmons, the former zoo director there. Plans for pandas went awry after the state cut a $400 million agricultural trade deal with Taiwan. Dr. Simmons said the Chinese ambassador had asked him to scuttle the deal.

When he did not, China declined to send the bears. “The Chinese were very unhappy with Omaha,” Mr. Towne, the former American panda negotiator, said.

In San Diego, a Chinese diplomat wrote to Mayor Todd Gloria in late 2023, requesting a meeting about pandas and “mutually-beneficial cooperation.” The mayor agreed to meet at the zoo, which an executive there suggested as a discreet location, emails and calendar records show.

When San Diego finally got pandas, in June, Mr. Gloria flew to China for their departure. While there, he said in an interview, he met with a deputy foreign minister in Beijing.

Mr. Gloria said that he understood it was a “fraught time” for U.S.-China relations but that he was cleareyed about the relationship.

“I could control what I am a part of,” Mr. Gloria said. “Through engagement, you gain understanding. You’re able to collaborate.”

But Beijing’s talking points crept into the panda welcome ceremony in San Diego — and not just into the Chinese ambassador’s speech. Paul Baribault, a zoo official, talked about the institution’s commitment to a “shared future,” a signature foreign policy concept of Mr. Xi that sees China and other countries competing with the United States for influence.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California talked about “common humanity,” another buzzword of Mr. Xi’s government.

San Francisco is still waiting to hear when its pandas will arrive. Ms. Breed lost her re-election bid in November, but her successor, Daniel Lurie, said that he hopes to bring pandas back to the city.

A city report recently described the San Francisco Zoo as “unsafe for the animals and visitors.” The city is auditing the zoo’s finances, which administrators say could jeopardize hopes for pandas. But there are no indications that China has changed plans.

In a brief interview with The Times after the San Diego ceremony, Xie Feng, China’s ambassador to the United States, said: “The American people, they are so fond of pandas.”

Joy Dong contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

The offer was as enticing as it was unexpected for a relative political newcomer. Three years ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked Mélanie Joly to become foreign affairs minister, among the most prestigious and highest profile portfolios in Canada’s cabinet.

But Ms. Joly, who at the time held a significantly less influential ministerial role, turned him down flat.

Her refusal wasn’t because of the fact that she lacked foreign policy experience. She said no because she feared that the travel involved in the globe-trotting job would force her to abandon her yearslong quest to conceive a child through in vitro fertilization.

But Canada’s leader refused to give up.

Mr. Trudeau offered to make whatever arrangements necessary to maintain Ms. Joly’s treatment anywhere in the world. “‘If you become pregnant,’” she remembers him telling her, “‘it would be a fantastic message you would send to the world.’”

After consulting her husband, parents and siblings, Ms. Joly relented, becoming Canada’s top diplomat.

Like her counterparts around the world, Ms. Joly has since had to grapple with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Then there are the diplomatic stresses specific to Canada.

She is still trying to heal a rift with China that developed after that country jailed two Canadians in apparent retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a Chinese executive at the request of the United States.

Now she’s at the center of Canada’s greatest diplomatic crisis in recent years: accusations that the government of India and its diplomats worked with criminal gangs to intimidate and even murder Canadian citizens who are supporters of a separate Sikh state.

And the return of President-elect Donald J. Trump, and his threat to impose large tariffs on Canadian goods, poses so many diplomatic, economic and immigration issues that Mr. Trudeau has revived a cabinet committee on U.S. relations that includes Ms. Joly.

Her handling of all these challenges has brought Ms. Joly, 45, both praise and criticism.

But what is less open to debate: The high-profile job has placed her among the likely successors to Mr. Trudeau, whose political popularity has cratered over the past year.

Like all members of Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet, Ms. Joly is publicly supportive of the prime minister. But other members of the Liberal Party have urged him to resign to let a new voice lead the party into elections that must be held by next October.

Mr. Trudeau has rebuffed these calls to quit as party leader, which would also mean resigning as prime minister. But speculation in the Canadian news media about who his successor will be — whenever that time comes — invariably includes Ms. Joly.

“I’ve known Trudeau for a long, long time, and he has my hundred percent support — period,” she said. “But the middle class is hurting, and Canadians expect us to be there for them.”

She added: “We need to be able to adapt.”

After graduating from law school, Ms. Joly landed a position at Stikeman Elliott, one of Canada’s largest law firms.

“I didn’t like it — period,” she said. “I was a litigator and I love, I love, being able to debate. But at the end of the day, I was debating for money and I wanted to have more impact on my community.”

Before quitting the law, Ms. Joly submitted a letter in 2007 to La Presse, a Montreal newspaper, condemning a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment then sweeping much of Quebec. Immigration, she wrote, “is not just a necessity, but an enrichment.”

After a brief stint in television journalism, Ms. Joly moved into public relations. Among her clients was a scion of the Bronfman family, which made its fortune with Seagram’s whisky, during the heir’s unsuccessful bid to buy the Montreal Canadiens hockey team.

That sort of work raised Ms. Joly’s profile to the point where she launched a bid in 2013 to become mayor of Montreal, her hometown, running on an anti-corruption platform. Despite zero political experience, she finished second.

Through her fund-raising for the arts, Ms. Joly met Alexandre Trudeau, a filmmaker, author and brother of Justin Trudeau. He invited her into a group that led his brother’s successful bid for the leadership of the Liberals in 2013.

Two years later, Ms. Joly was not only a newly minted member of Parliament, representing a district in Montreal, but also part of Mr. Trudeau’s first, gender-balanced cabinet. Her open and friendly manner fit with the new prime minister’s promise of a “sunny ways” approach to governing.

Her first position was also high profile: the minister responsible for cultural matters. But a deal she struck with Netflix to invest in Canadian film productions created outrage in Quebec because it included no commitments to French language programming. She was soon demoted to tourism minister and then held a series of other minor posts.

Ms. Joly had studied international law as a graduate student at Oxford but never practiced it. If she had been harboring an interest in global affairs as a lawmaker, she never made it public and was largely focused on domestic policy issues before accepting the foreign minister role.

Within a month of her promotion, there was another life-changing event: She was pregnant.

“So the two main dreams of my life were happening at the same time,” Ms. Joly said in her modest walk-up apartment in Montreal’s bohemian Plateau neighborhood. “When you’re pregnant, you feel empowered. I felt empowered.”

But before she even had much time to settle into her demanding new job, she suffered a miscarriage. She has continued with her I.V.F. treatments since, including meeting with physicians as she travels the world.

“There is a second room that is still under construction that could be ready for a baby,” she said, gesturing to the other side of the apartment, before briefly losing her composure and excusing herself for a moment.

From her first day on the job, Ms. Joly faced the same fundamental issue that has confronted all her predecessors: defining a place in the world for a middle-sized power with a relatively large economy, huge landmass and relatively small military.

Ms. Joly’s answer is what she calls “pragmatic diplomacy,” which includes the idea that “we need to work with countries that we don’t see eye-to-eye with.”

Ms. Joly recently said that the government’s previous experience with Mr. Trump, as well as its efforts to develop relationships with members of his new administration, have made it something of a model of how to deal with his White House.

“If there’s a country in the world that understands the United States, it’s Canada,” Ms. Joly said this month at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru. “That’s why there are so many delegations, so many countries, coming to see us.”

Under Ms. Joly, Canada did try to work with India, if unsuccessfully, before ultimately expelling six diplomats.

While relations with China have slid further following intelligence leaks indicating that it attempted to interfere in Canadian elections, Ms. Joly went to Beijing in July to meet her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.

“There’s that movement — which I am profoundly against — which is if you don’t engage with countries, you’re sending a message that you’re strong,” she said. “I think that to be strong is to be able to have the tough conversations.”

Not everyone agrees.

Lawrence Herman, a fellow with the C.D. Howe Institute, a policy group, wrote in The Globe and Mail newspaper that the trip to Beijing was “one of the most ill-conceived and self-defeating Canadian foreign-policy initiatives in recent memory.” By traveling to China, he wrote, Ms. Joly “makes Canada look like a supplicant.”

But Ms. Joly insists diplomacy is no different than any other part of life.

“For me, international relations is, first, about human connections and, second, it’s about being able to understand the different interests at stake,” she said. “What I’ve learned through my professional life is how to look at very complex situations and make them simple for people.”

While there are already skeptical voices about the prospects of her still-hypothetical leadership campaign, Ms. Joly has encountered similar doubts before.

“It’s been the story of my life, you know, being underestimated,” she said.