Britain has sent a parade of senior officials to China this year, part of a calculated charm offensive to thaw out relations with a country that looms large in a world order upended by the United States under President Trump.

But an emergency move by the British Parliament last weekend to take control of a Chinese-owned British steel mill has struck a discordant note amid all the diplomacy. And it could raise deeper questions about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s efforts to cultivate warmer ties with China, at a time when Mr. Trump’s tariffs are sowing fears about protectionism and fraying trade agreements worldwide.

Britain acted to prevent the Chinese company that owns the plant, in the town of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, from shutting down two blast furnaces, which could have shuttered the plant, cost 2,700 jobs and left Britain reliant on other countries for what it considers a strategically important commodity.

The government’s fruitless negotiations with the company, which refused subsidies to stay open, has prompted accusations of bad faith and even rumors of sabotage by the Chinese owner, which British officials rejected. But they are questioning whether other Chinese companies should be allowed to invest in sensitive industries.

“We have got to be clear about what is the sort of sector where actually we can promote and cooperate and ones, frankly, where we can’t,” Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, told Sky News on Sunday. “I wouldn’t personally bring a Chinese company into our steel sector.”

Mr. Reynolds said the Chinese company, Jingye, had refused to order vital raw materials, knowing that this would lead to the closure of the mill, Britain’s last big producer of crude steel, used in construction projects.

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Nathali Sánchez last heard from her husband on March 14, when he called from a Texas detention center to say he was being deported back to Venezuela. Later that night, he texted her through a government messaging app for detainees.

“I love you,” he wrote, “soon we will be together forever.”

Her husband, Arturo Suárez Trejo, 33, a musician, had been in American custody for a month, calling every few days to assure his family that he was OK, his relatives said. Now, the couple believed they would reunite and he would finally meet his daughter, Nahiara, who had been born during his brief stint as a migrant in the United States.

But less than a day later, Mr. Suárez was shackled, loaded onto a plane and sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, according to an internal government list of detainees obtained by The New York Times. Around the time Mr. Suárez was texting his wife, the Trump administration was quietly invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a sweeping wartime power that allows the government to swiftly deport citizens of an invading nation.

Mr. Suárez and 237 others, the Trump administration argued after the order became public, were all members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, which was “aligned with” the Venezuelan government and was “perpetrating” an invasion of the United States.

The latest warning came 10 days before the deadliest air crash in South Korea.

A dozen officials gathered inside a room at Muan International Airport for a meeting of a bird strike prevention committee, where they discussed the number of aircraft being hit by birds, with data showing a jump in incidents over the past couple of years.

One official, from one of the country’s aviation training institutes, expressed concern that planes coming in to land often encountered flocks of birds by the coastline, according to a record of the meeting obtained by a lawmaker. To what extent is it possible to keep the birds away? the official asked.

The answer wasn’t reassuring. There weren’t enough people and cars deployed at the airport to keep birds away, and sounds from loudspeakers used to broadcast noises to scare birds off weren’t strong enough to reach far enough beyond the airport, said an official from the company that managed the airport’s facilities. He noted that they “were trying their best.”

Then, on Dec. 29, the pilot of Jeju Air Flight 2216 declared “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” and told air traffic controllers there had been a bird strike as the plane was making its descent. After making a sharp turn, the jet landed on its belly, slid down the runway and rammed into a concrete barrier, exploding into a fireball that killed 179 of the 181 people on board.

Investigators have not identified the reasons for the crash and what role, if any, a bird strike might have played. But the country’s transport ministry said bird feathers and blood were found in both of the jet’s engines. The remains were identified as being from the Baikal teal, a migratory duck common to South Korea in winter that often flies in flocks of up to tens or even hundreds of thousands.

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Auvers-sur-Oise, a village near Paris famed as an artist’s paradise, is also where Vincent Van Gogh spent his final days and it has long drawn tourists to walk in the tortured painter’s last footsteps. But ever since art experts identified his final work before he took his life, there has been strife in the town.

Van Gogh’s final painting was disputed for decades, because he didn’t date his works. But in 2020 experts concluded that gnarled tree roots protruding from a hillside in Auvers, as depicted in his “Tree Roots,” was made on the day he died. This finding may have settled one dispute, but it immediately stirred another, this one between the municipality and the owners of the property where the roots grow.

The main root depicted in the painting — from a black locust tree and dubbed the “elephant” by enthusiasts — abuts a public road. After the discovery of its historical value, the municipality claimed a section of privately owned land near the road as public domain, saying it was necessary for maintenance. Jean-François and Hélène Serlinger, the property owners, fought the village, and an appeals court recently concluded there was no basis for the municipality’s claim.

But the mayor of Auvers, Isabelle Mézières, has pledged to keep fighting, and she can still appeal to a higher court. After the decision, she insisted that the site should belong to the public, not private owners. “The Roots belong to the Auversois!” she wrote on social media, referring to the citizens of the region.

The continued fight over Van Gogh’s tree roots has cast a pall over what is usually a celebratory season in Auvers, population 7,000, where art tourism is a big business that heats up in the spring.

China has for years presented an economic challenge for Europe. Now, it could become an economic disaster.

It produces a vast array of artificially cheap goods — heavily subsidized electric vehicles, consumer electronics, toys, commercial grade steel and more — but much of that trade was destined for the endlessly voracious American marketplace.

With many of those goods now facing an extraordinary wall of tariffs thanks to President Trump, fear is rising that more products will be dumped in Europe, weakening local industries in France, Germany, Italy and the rest of the European Union.

Those nations now find themselves trapped in the middle of Mr. Trump’s spiraling trade war with China. Their leaders are straddling a fine line between capitulation and confrontation, hoping to avoid becoming collateral damage.

“The overcapacity challenge has taken a long time, but it has finally arrived in European capitals,” said Liana Fix, a Washington-based fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a general trend and a feeling in Europe that in these times, Europe has to stand up for itself and has to protect itself.”

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has promised to “engage constructively” with China even as she has warned about the “indirect effects” of the American tariffs and has vowed to closely watch the flow of Chinese goods. A new task force will monitor imports for signs of dumping.

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President Xi Jinping of China kicked off a weeklong tour of Southeast Asia Monday, landing in Hanoi and trying to rally other nations to Beijing’s side as American tariffs threaten manufacturing networks and economic growth.

In an essay published Monday in Vietnamese state media just before his arrival, Mr. Xi called on other countries to join with China in defending stability, free trade and “an open and cooperative international environment.”

“There are no winners in trade wars and tariff wars,” Mr. Xi wrote, echoing comments he made recently in Beijing. “Protectionism has no way out.”

Mr. Xi’s weeklong tour of Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia aims to amplify that message. As President Trump’s tariffs send shock waves through the global economy, Mr. Xi is both striking back against the United States, and telling the world that he is now the leader to rely on for wealth creation and for nations that feel betrayed by the wild swings of Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda.

The next few days will likely be filled with dramatic, choreographed warmth — dozens of women in traditional Vietnamese dresses waving Chinese flags greeted Mr. Xi as he stepped onto the tarmac in Hanoi just before noon. But behind the scenes, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

Vietnam and its neighbors are all trying to appease President Trump to get tariffs lowered, which may make them resistant to making bold pro-China pronouncements. The U.S.-China trade war — involving whopping tit-for-tat tariffs and the suspension of critical rare earths exports by China — has also made every country more vulnerable to a global recession, and more confused about where the world order might be heading.

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