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.

Now, with many of those goods 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.

“We cannot absorb global overcapacity nor will we accept dumping on our market,” Ms. von der Leyen said as Mr. Trump’s tariffs went into effect.

Her tough but measured message to both China and the United States has impressed trade experts who say it may be the best chance for Europe to avoid economic disaster. Janka Oertel, the director of the Asia program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, called it a “sober” response to the threat from Beijing.

“They continue to stand their ground on China, because otherwise they lose it,” she said.

But the high stakes moment is testing the continent’s unity.

Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, last week traveled to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping, urging greater engagement with China as a hedge against U.S. tariffs. His outreach, captured visually in a handshake with the Chinese leader, came even as Ms. von der Leyen and the leadership of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, continue to demand assurances from Beijing that the dumping would not accelerate.

Germany last year opposed higher electric vehicle tariffs imposed by the European Union, afraid that China would raise taxes on its own car industry. In Britain, no longer a member of the bloc, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for “consistent, durable, respectful” relations with China as he struggles to jump-start his country’s sluggish economy.

“The worst-case scenario is high U.S. tariffs” while at the same time “China is flooding the European market,” said Noah Barkin, a senior adviser for the Rhodium Group, a policy research organization. He said that would be “a double whammy for European industry. That is what Europe wants to avoid.”

Leaders who argue that closer ties with China may be part of the answer, like Mr. Sánchez in Spain and Mr. Starmer in Britain, have found it to be a politically winning message at a time when their countries are eager for more foreign investment.

Announcements of a new Chinese factory that will eventually create thousands of jobs are popular at home. But at times, that eagerness can threaten to undercut a consistent, European message on trade.

“Spain sees things very differently from Poland,” said Theresa Fallon, director at the Center for Russia, Europe, Asia Studies in Brussels. “There’s an ongoing debate in Europe about what their stance toward China should be.”

But trade experts say the economic relationship between Europe and China is rooted in a decades-old reality: a Chinese marketplace that is effectively closed to many European companies because of regulatory burdens and the Communist Party’s buttressing of Chinese companies. The European trade deficit with China was nearly $332 billion (€292 billion) in 2023.

The E.U. leadership describes China as a “a systemic rival,” and relations with the Asian nation have soured in recent years for a host of reasons, including China’s support of Russia as it wages war on Ukraine.

Recent conversations between top European commissioners and their Chinese counterparts have contained blunt warnings from the European side.

“Current E.U.-China trade relations remain unbalanced,” the European Commission said in a statement after Maros Sefcovic, the bloc’s trade commissioner, visited Beijing to discuss market access. The statement hinted at tensions during the visit, saying that China and Europe have a widening trade deficit “fueled by illegal subsidies.”

European officials have for years demanded concessions from China that include voluntary restraints on the shipment of cheap goods and minimum prices to offset large government subsidies that European businesses charge are unfair.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials have seemed eager in recent days to paint Europe as an increasingly close trading partner. China’s readout after Mr. Sefcovic’s visit to Beijing had little mention of hard talk. It said that Mr. Sefcovic had described China as “an important partner” and that the two economies would “jointly resist unilateralism and protectionism.”

And after Mr. Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement, China’s Commerce Ministry said it had agreed to restart negotiations with the bloc over Europe’s higher tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles.

When asked about that announcement, European officials struck a more muted tone. Olof Gill, an E.U. spokesman for trade, said officials had agreed to “continue discussions” on electric vehicle supply chains and take a “fresh look” at pricing.

China’s push has at times been more overt. The Mission of China to the European Union has run a series of sponsored articles on the website Euractiv, a prominent source in Brussels policy circles. The articles focus on how China and Europe might draw closer together. “With a hurricane blowing through Washington, China is looking more like a strategic partner for Europe,” one declared.

For now, the European Union has made little show of embracing that — instead pushing China to reach a deal with the United States, hoping to avoid the fallout if it fails to do so.

An E.U.-China summit is set to take place this year, potentially in the second half of July.

“I think basically Europe is just hoping to make it into summer with everything intact, more or less, and to not have the economy crashed,” Ms. Fix said. “To sort of land the plane until the summer, and then to prepare for what comes next.”

In the beach towns west of Tampa, Fla., the message was clear for any spring breaker passing through. It appeared on chalkboard signs, waving inflatables and posters: We are open.

Spring break season is fraught in some parts of Florida, where the raucous behavior of certain visitors can outweigh their economic benefit. Miami Beach has been on a yearslong campaign to deter the college crowd, including with an ad this year for a fake reality show in which partyers break the rules and suffer consequences.

But for the businesses and the restaurants along the Gulf of Mexico that were ravaged by Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year, welcoming spring breakers — and anyone else, really — has been imperative. Some are still in temporary setups, or barely weeks into reopening, so every dollar is crucial. Many had anxiously anticipated the season, which began in early March and will wrap up in the next week or so, as a barometer for post-hurricane success.

There are other pressures on Florida’s retail and tourism industries: Inflation and the threat of punitive tariffs have rattled the American economy. But in the Tampa-St. Petersburg region, few can remember a hurricane season as disruptive as last year’s, when Hurricanes Helene and Milton delivered a one-two punch just 13 days apart.

Some businesses and hotels remain closed, and local governments have been swamped with post-storm requests for building permits; many have expedited the process by waiving fees or setting up temporary remote sites to process claims. More than 8,000 emergency rebuilding permits have been issued in St. Petersburg alone, for an estimated $150 million in construction value.

Hurricane Helene, in particular, “was a very humbling experience,” said Savannah Huski, 28, a manager at the Bronze Lady, a boutique along the John’s Pass Boardwalk in Madeira Beach that flooded. The store had to close for two months and between the damage, the wrecked merchandise and the closure, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The ocean is both the greatest draw and the worst threat along the Gulf Coast. But hurricane season does not begin until June, making spring visits more appealing for many out-of-town visitors.

“Spring break is our season, more than summer,” said Charlotte Hunter, the co-owner of Wild Time Caribbean, a store along the boardwalk in Madeira Beach that sells beach apparel and a menagerie of stuffed manatees and turtles. The store had to cancel merchandise orders in the immediate aftermath of the hurricanes, when there was still sand and debris piled in the roads and along the streets.

“That’s why spring was so important for us — to recoup some of that,” said Ms. Hunter’s husband, John Hunter. The slow trickle at the start of the season gave them pause, and their door count was down by about 1,500 people for the second half of March. But it was unclear, the couple said, whether that was also influenced by inflation and a shaky economic outlook.

Signs of recovery were everywhere. The city of Treasure Island held a new festival, “Back to the Beach: Sand & Kites & Coastal Delights,” last month after canceling several events over the fall and the winter. Storm debris was largely cleared away so that visitors and locals alike could safely walk along the streets and shorelines.

Permits were approved so that businesses could legally operate outside of their damaged buildings, allowing them to reopen while they wrestled with bureaucratic paperwork.

Still, there had been a lot of anxiety about whether anyone would show up.

“There was a lot of question marks,” said Stephen Santasieri, the general manager at Caddy’s, a popular beach-front restaurant and bar in Treasure Island. Its building was flooded during Hurricane Helene, and snarled pipes and frayed wood were still exposed .

Mr. Santasieri estimated that it would take at least a year to rebuild. Caddy’s spent three weeks of spring break serving $8 Patron cocktails and $10 margaritas (with a free gift) from a makeshift outdoor setup.

Its kitchen is operating out of a food truck, without its usual fresh grouper and oysters. Rather than scribble their names on a strip of wood along the restaurant’s bar, a tradition at Caddy’s before the storm, customers have instead signed a banner hanging nearby.

“People have really appreciated it,” Mr. Santasieri said. “They’re just happy to see it back.”

In recent weeks, pink and purple bougainvillea bloomed near storm-battered sea grape bushes and palm trees. Beachgoers with rosy shoulders carried bags of snacks past construction workers repairing roofs.

Some visitors came only after calling their hotels or their favorite haunts for assurance that they were open. Others had forgotten that the storms had even passed through.

“I wasn’t even thinking about it,” said Lubomira Paskaleva, a teacher visiting from Kansas City, as she walked along the beach in Treasure Island, seashells in hand. “Why wouldn’t we want to go?”

The owners of the Airbnb she was staying in appeared to be raising the house with more pilings, she said, but it did not detract from how beautiful the beaches were.

For many, the emotional and financial pain of navigating the hurricanes’ aftermath remains acute. John Messmore, who owns Sweet Sage Cafe in North Redington Beach, said that after the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene reached more than three feet inside, “everything was upside down and floating in salt water.”

He spent the next few months wrestling with all the paperwork needed to get a building permit. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent just to replace four 80-foot trees behind the cafe, let alone the furniture and supplies inside.

“It would have been much easier to turn around and walk away,” said Mr. Messmore, 81, wearing a hat with “Relax” embroidered in gold thread across the front. But, he added, “I just had to make sure it was put back together right.”

Gen. Brice Oligui Nguema has won the presidential election in the Central African nation of Gabon, according to provisional results, cementing the military officer’s hold on power after he staged a coup in 2023.

General Nguema won with more than 90 percent of the votes, the Interior Ministry said on Sunday. His main opponent, former Prime Minister Alain Claude Bilie-By-Nze, conceded defeat on Monday.

Gabon’s Constitutional Court is expected to announce official results in the coming days, though opponents and analysts have suggested that the election was geared toward General Nguema’s victory.

General Nguema is now set to govern Gabon for the next seven years, the second leader of a Central African country to win an election in recent years after grabbing power by force.

His victory highlights the return to elected power of men in uniform in West and Central Africa, which has experienced eight coups in the past five years.

Mahamat Déby, the current military leader of Chad, was declared the winner of a presidential contest last year after he seized power there in 2021.

Several other military officials who staged coups in West Africa over the past few years have stayed in power by delaying elections and maintaining lengthy transition rules.

General Nguema, 50, had vowed to relinquish power after a takeover that ended a decades-long political dynasty. But after his administration adopted a new constitution and introduced a new electoral code that allowed military officers to run in elections, he swapped his uniform for jeans and Air Jordans on the campaign trail.

Gabon is rich in mineral resources and oil, but the country faces a number of challenges.

Its economy remains overly dependent on oil, which accounts for 38 percent of Gabon’s gross domestic product.

The country is also among the world’s most corrupt, according to the watchdog Transparency International — a trend that preceded General Nguema’s military takeover. And more than 40 percent of young people in Gabon are unemployed.

Throughout the campaign, opponents of General Nguema accused him of flouting electoral rules by using state funds to finance his campaign. Even as he conceded defeat, Mr. Bilie-By-Nze said on Monday that the election had been “a farce” and complained of “Soviet-style results.”

“Fairness was undermined by the imbalance of resources — with one candidate campaigning at the taxpayers’ expense while others had to rely on their personal means,” he said.

Analysts say General Nguema fashioned the election so it could only benefit him. The constitutional reform that allowed him to run for office extended presidential terms to seven years and removed the role of the prime minister.

The new electoral code also prevented a prominent opponent from running by capping an age limit of 70 years for any candidate.

On Sunday, after the provisional results were announced, General Nguema said the returns left no doubt over who had won.

“I am a captain who knows how to bring a ship to a safe port,” he said. “You will see how the country is going to take off.”

As artificial intelligence makes its way into schools, a paradox is emerging.

Many educators, concerned about cheating and shortcuts, are trying to limit student use of A.I.

At the same time, teachers are increasingly using A.I. tools themselves, both to save time on rote tasks and to outsource some of their most meaningful work, like grading essays and tutoring struggling students.

That tension has prompted some difficult ethical questions. For example, is it fair to use A.I. to grade student essays, if you’ve prohibited students from using A.I. to write them?

School leaders are grappling with these dilemmas as they confront a barrage of marketing claims around how A.I. could “transform,” “personalize” and “accelerate” learning.

A.I. “is already being used by the majority of teachers and students,” said Jennifer Carolan, a former history teacher and founder of Reach Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in A.I. learning tools.

But as the technology works its way into schools, some educators say they are concerned that tech companies are pouring resources into A.I. applications, like tutoring bots, that disrupt the human relationships at the core of teaching and learning — instead of creating tools to ease the bureaucratic burdens that shift adults’ attention away from children.

Cheating, or Homework Help?

Among middle school students, word has gotten out about a solution for tricky math assignments. If you take a photograph of a problem and feed it into one of several free A.I. apps, the software will show you the correct answer and break the solution down step by step.

It’s easy to then copy those steps out, exactly as if you had solved the problem by hand.

Alex Baron, an administrator at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., said he considered the widely used math apps a form of cheating.

But he acknowledged that he has found some compelling uses of A.I. in his own work. For instance, he can analyze students’ academic and behavioral data, and then split them into groups for targeted support.

Several of the popular math apps that concern Mr. Baron are owned by Google, including PhotoMath and Google Lens.

Robert Wong, Google’s director of product management for learning and education, said the tools are invaluable for students whose parents cannot help them with math homework.

He suggested that cheating had less to do with access to A.I. than with “other factors, like, are students engaged in the class?”

Indeed, educators experimenting with A.I. are seeking to solve the perennial problem of how to get students more excited about learning.

In Llano, Texas, Maurie Beasley, a school district technology administrator, has suggested to teachers that they use A.I. to personalize assignments.

With activities written by a chatbot, some students can work on a word problem about velocity using the example of a speeding baseball, while others consider a dancer leaping through the air.

Then there are the gray areas.

Teaching transparency

In Providence, R.I., middle school history teacher Jon Gold has found generative A.I. useful in lesson planning.

He trained ChatGPT by feeding it dozens of pages of curriculum materials he wrote over many years. That helped the bot spit back useful material. It can edit a long reading assignment down to three paragraphs for a short exercise, or create dummy essays that illustrate for students the difference between an effective essay and one that lacks supporting evidence.

Transparency is key, he said. He explains to students exactly how he has used A.I., in part to model ethical use.

Asking a chatbot to summarize notes into a study guide is a good idea, for example. But he does not want students using A.I. to draft essays or conduct research. He tells them that finding various sources of information and synthesizing them in writing is key to learning history.

He also talks with students about knotty ethical issues around how chatbots rely on copyrighted material and consume an immense amount of energy.

“I am more pro-A.I.-literacy than I am pro-A.I.-use,” said Mr. Gold, who teaches at Moses Brown School, a private Quaker academy.

Writing Help (for Teachers)

Writing is one of the most challenging tasks for students, which is why it is so tempting for some to ask A.I. to do it for them. In turn, A.I. can be useful for teachers who would like to assign more writing, but are limited in their time to grade it.

Companies like MagicSchool and Brisk Teaching already offer A.I. products that give instant feedback on student writing.

Automated scoring is also happening in high-stakes scenarios — on exams that determine whether students graduate from high school.

In 2020, the state of Texas signed a five-year, $391,000,000 contract with the education technology firm Cambium Assessment, in part to deliver automated scoring of student writing.

The technology is not generative A.I. with access to the open internet, but instead uses an older form of artificial intelligence trained on human-graded writing samples.

Earlier this year, Dallas school officials complained after some questions on state tests were graded by the software, and scores were lower than district leaders expected. When the district submitted about 4,600 student writing samples for regrading, about 2,000 received a higher score.

Jake Kobersky, a spokesman for the Texas Education Agency, said the adjustments were minor in the context of Dallas’s 71,000 writing samples. He said the state remained confident in the technology.

Studies show that human grading of writing, too, is prone to bias and error — and that advanced forms of generative A.I. may be accurate and consistent graders of simple writing tasks.

The Dallas superintendent, Stephanie Elizalde, acknowledged that even as she raised concerns about the state’s use of automated scoring, her own district has embraced A.I. It has used the technology to grade students’ practice Advanced Placement essays, she said, and to assist staff members in summarizing documents and analyzing large sets of data.

Dallas students are already using A.I. to conduct research, she said, and learning about the importance of verifying information they receive from chatbots.

“It’s irresponsible to not teach it,” she said of A.I. “We have to. We are preparing kids for their future.”

A.I. in Schools Is Big Business

Over the past two years, companies working at the nexus of artificial intelligence and education have raised $1.5 billion, according to an analysis by Reach Capital, the venture firm.

The biggest players in education technology, like Google, Microsoft and Khan Academy, are also heavily promoting A.I. for student research, tutoring and teacher lesson planning.

Mr. Wong, of Google, said the company’s vision for A.I. is to provide “a tutor for every learner and a T.A. for every teacher.”

Google’s Gemini chatbot, for instance, can probe students with questions that prompt them to demonstrate and practice what they know.

School leaders are parsing which of these technologies might become essential and which should be passed up.

Mr. Baron, the administrator in Washington, D.C., said one company had pushed an A.I. product that watches video footage of teachers teaching, and offers feedback.

Teacher observation and evaluation are among the most complex and important tasks he does, he said. Instead of outsourcing that job, he would prefer an A.I. tool that helped him maintain his school’s master schedule and search for substitutes — chores that routinely eat up hours of his day.

“I really want the teacher to be reading students’ work and helping them become better writers. I want school leaders to observe teacher practice,” he said.

Ms. Carolan, the Reach Capital partner, said marketing around A.I. could sometimes be “overly aggressive.” She added, “It’s important for everybody to be facile with the language and technology and be able to evaluate these products.”

But many educators — and policymakers — are not deeply conversant on A.I.

Los Angeles, for example, hired an inexperienced start-up to create an A.I. chat bot for students and families. The effort failed and the company’s chief executive was charged with fraud.

Many individual teachers are finding themselves navigating this terrain on their own, determining when A.I. is the enemy, and also, how it could be a friend.

Mike Sullivan, a middle school math teacher in Brockton, Mass., estimated about half his students are using problem-solvers like Google Lens. Some constrain their use to homework help. But he has also caught students using A.I. tools during in-class quizzes.

“It’s just too easy,” Mr. Sullivan said. The experience has made him rethink the wisdom of relying on computers so heavily in the classroom.

Still, he would love it, he added, if he had access to an A.I. tool that would make his own life easier, by taking student work produced on paper and seamlessly transferring it to a digital grade book.