What should the U.S. do then? Don’t back down.

1. Congressional delegations ought to arrive in Taiwan every week for the next year. Make them so routine that Beijing forgets to protest.

2. President Biden should formally state what he has said repeatedly off the cuff: that the United States will intervene militarily if China seeks to invade Taiwan. He can underscore the point with frequent transits of U.S. Navy ships through the Taiwan Strait, along with an expansion of the secretive joint training exercises that U.S. and Taiwanese special-operations forces have already conducted.

3. The United States can also provide Taiwan with the kind of easily dispersed, easily hidden, asymmetric weapons that have done such damage to the Russians: Javelin anti-tank missiles, Switchblade “kamikaze” drones, Stinger antiaircraft missiles, naval-strike antiship missiles.

4. Biden should propose sharp increases in military spending, particularly for the Navy, which now ranks behind China’s in terms of ship numbers. It would have bipartisan support both as an industrial policy and as a measure of global security.