The Week

• Anybody who doesn’t believe inflation is out of control should see what Hunter Biden is charging for a painting.

• With the federal government a few weeks away from hitting the debt limit, Congress agreed to buy itself time. We will now hit the limit in December. Both parties profess to be against the default that will happen unless Congress raises the limit. Republicans, however, say that since Democrats are setting tax and spending policy without their input, they should raise the debt limit by themselves as well. Democrats think Republicans should have to vote for an increase, too, obviously fearing that a partisan vote to raise the limit will increase their political exposure over their spending binge. The only thing they would dislike more than having to take that responsibility is forgoing the binge.

• President Biden insists that his massive new spending proposal costs “zero dollars.” Many heads were scratched at the claim. In fact, the estimated cost of the package is, depending on how you count, somewhere between $3.5 trillion and $5 trillion. “Oh, no,” say the Biden apologists, “what he meant was that, because the program is ‘paid for,’ it will add zero dollars to the deficit.” But nobody believes that, either. Moody’s Analytics forecast that the bill would in the (unlikely) best-case scenario add hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt. The Washington Post handed the question over to its fact-checking desk and produced two Pinocchios, reserving for itself the option to downgrade the claim even further. Congressional Democrats are working to ensure that the bill ends up even more of a debt monster, with a group of House members threatening to reject the bill unless it includes a large tax cut for rich people in high-tax cities and states – who are mostly Democrats – by removing the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes. Republicans should step on the brakes to the extent they can. Biden’s boast of zero cost should ideally be a reality.

• Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum to the FBI and federal prosecutors across the country about alleged threats against school officials. The memo, which directs the FBI to meet with state and local officials about the matter, is clearly meant to send a message to the parents who have been showing up at school-board meetings to protest critical race theory, trans radicalism, and mask mandates. It has no foundation in the law (and doesn’t even cite any legal basis); doesn’t cite any specific crimes, let alone any federal crimes, that prompted the DOJ to act; and came in response to a transparently political letter from the National School Boards Association complaining about parental activism. The memo is an abuse of power that, should they win Congress next year, Republicans shouldn’t forget, either when conducting oversight of DOJ or considering its enforcement budget.

• A group of protesters chased Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) into a public restroom, where members of LUCHA – Living United for Change in Arizona – filmed her, along with Arizona State University students in the facilities. Progressives have gone to great lengths to excuse this abusive behavior. Writing in The New Republic – which, after all, has justified worse behavior than this, Stalinism leading the list – Jason Linkins argued that a “ruder form of politics becomes inevitable when people are deprived of political power.” Sarah Jones, writing in New York, offered a similar excuse: The protesters “are shut out of a supposedly democratic process.” In fact, the senator and her staff had met with LUCHA’s representatives on more than one occasion, which is a lot more access than the typical American ever gets. Linkins says that Senator Sinema could spare herself these assaults easily: “Just pass Biden’s agenda, already.” That’s the logic of bullying. There is, or should be, such a thing as private life, even for a politician. And if there is a private sphere, it presumably encompasses the toilet.

• Terry McAuliffe, the ghost of Virginia Democrats – past, present, and future – is getting nervous. McAuliffe hopes to reprise his role as governor in the Old Dominion but is having a tougher go of it than he expected; Republican Glenn Youngkin is putting up a fight, and the polls continue to narrow. Now McAuliffe is trying to declare one of Youngkin’s issues out of bounds. According to McAuliffe, any discussion of the role critical race theory plays in public schools is “racist, it’s a dog whistle.” Polling shows that 47 percent of Virginians would support a statewide ban on CRT in schools, and only 36 percent explicitly oppose such a measure. McAuliffe recently said that parents should not have input in the schools. If he keeps talking like this, maybe he won’t either.

• Running for Ohio’s Republican Senate nomination, J. D. Vance asks why we don’t “seize” and “tax” the assets of the Ford Foundation and other left-wing nonprofits and give the money to the victims of their ideas. The answer is that taxing all nonprofits would be a calamity for civil society, while taxing nonprofits selectively based on the government’s attitude toward their political activities would be a calamity for political freedom. Either option would radically increase the federal government’s role in American life. As ill considered as this suggestion is, though, Vance looks like a Madisonian statesman in comparison with his main rival for the nomination, Josh Mandel, who is basing his campaign on the theory that the decisive voter is a boob. Mandel has symbolically burned a mask, called for a commission to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, and hailed Christopher Columbus as a great American – all while denouncing the “Republican establishment” of which he is a longtime member. Vance seems to be sincere about his ideas, and Mandel the opposite. Which of them this contrast favors is sometimes unclear.

• Over the years, we’ve become accustomed to progressive critiques of the filibuster. “Arcane Senate rules are allowing a minority to block what the majority wants, and that’s not right!” What we’ve not yet seen is progressive advocacy of minority rule – that is, until now. In a recent press conference, Senator Bernie Sanders asserted that “two people do not have the right to sabotage what 48 want and what the president of the United States wants.” The close reader will note that it’s not two senators – Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – who are holding up the 48: It’s 52. Maybe Sanders learned this version of democracy on his honeymoon.

• Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee issued an overwrought report about President Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department to participate in his bogus campaign about a “stolen election.” In a nutshell, Trump co-opted a midlevel DOJ bureaucrat, Jeffrey Clark, to draft a letter advising several state legislatures to reconsider their certifications of Biden’s victory in their states, based on DOJ investigations of voter fraud. Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his top advisers dismissed the proposal as daft, pointing out (among other problems) that the investigations had not found fraud on an election-altering scale, as Rosen’s predecessor Bill Barr had announced before resigning. Clark was instructed to stand down. Upon being admonished that there would be mass DOJ resignations if he tried to replace Rosen with Clark, Trump dropped the idea. As in so many cases, the best that could be said about Trump was that he was willing to defer to appointees who had better judgment than he did.

• Trump recorded a video for Ashli Babbitt’s birthday in which he declared that “there was no reason Ashli should have lost her life that day.” Would that he were capable of reflecting on his own role in that tragedy.

• Corey Lewandowski, the 2016 Trump campaign manager, was removed from his post overseeing Trump’s super PAC following well-corroborated allegations that he had sexually harassed Trump donor Trashelle Odom at a fundraiser in Las Vegas. Lewandowski “repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful,” Odom said in a statement that provided disturbing details. Lewandowski’s lawyer isn’t exactly denying the story. This isn’t the first time Lewandowski has behaved deplorably toward women. In 2016, Lewandowski grabbed then–Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields so aggressively that she was left with bruises on her arm. This time, though, he went after a donor, and that was reportedly too much for Trump.

• President Biden has nominated a Marxist crackpot to be comptroller of the currency. Professor Saule Omarova teaches at Cornell Law and is the author of, among other titles, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital” – a paper she currently is trying to hide from inquiring senators. Her radicalism is not something kept in a drawer from her student days: In her own words, she proposes an “overtly radical” reorganization of the Federal Reserve that would nationalize the U.S. banking system and make the federal government and its organs the “ultimate public platform” for “allocating financial resources.” Which is to say, she isn’t one of those “I want a Scandinavian-style child-care-assistance program” socialists; she’s one of those “nationalize the means of production” socialists. Let’s keep her in the private sector.

• Shortly after taking office, President Biden directed the Department of Health and Human Services to rescind the Trump administration’s “Protect Life” rule, which required clinics that receive Title X family-planning funding not to perform or encourage abortions. Beginning in November, the Protect Life rule will no longer apply, allowing Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to return to Title X without financially separating their abortion business – which means that taxpayers once again will be required to fund the country’s top abortionist. When the rule was in place, Planned Parenthood declined to make the required separation, forfeiting about $60 million a year. Now those funds will flow again. Biden has sometimes said he “personally opposes” abortion, but he supports it with your tax dollars.

• When the Supreme Court struck down the CDC’s unconstitutional eviction moratorium on August 26, the Left wailed that millions would be thrown out on the street. Nancy Pelosi said ending the moratorium was “arbitrary and cruel,” and Cori Bush camped out on the steps of the Capitol to demonstrate her solidarity with all the soon-to-be homeless. In the more than six weeks since the moratorium ended, though, there has been no eviction wave. The Washington Post even reported that evictions in the Atlanta area in the first half of September were down compared with the same period in 2019. It’s almost as though there was never a looming eviction emergency that demanded extralegal action from the federal government in the first place.

• Facebook is taking a pounding in the press and on Capitol Hill after a former employee released a trove of internal documents. Condemnation has been bipartisan, but that bipartisanship is illusory. The focus of the company’s left-wing critics (and of that former employee) is that Facebook ought to be doing more to suppress “disinformation,” while critics on the right think it does more than enough suppressing already. The most damning revelation, though, does not directly concern politics. Facebook had commissioned research that found that one in three girls who used Instagram, one of its products, had a worse body image as a result, and that teens blamed the site for anxiety and depression. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” Maybe there is more that government can do about Facebook’s power in our society. There is certainly more that parents can do about its power in our families.

• Google announced that it will demonetize content on YouTube and its other platforms that contradicts the “scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” A year of mind-boggling inconsistency from public-health authorities would seem to call for a dash of humility about supposed scientific certainties, but that hasn’t deterred the wunderkinds of Silicon Valley. The move is an answer to pressure from the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. No one is entitled to money from YouTube, but the eagerness of tech firms to bend to the will of Democratic lawmakers is making them look increasingly like de facto state actors – without any democratic accountability.

• Once Tesla announced it was building a pickup truck, the next development should have been obvious: The electric-car maker is moving its headquarters from California to Texas. Tesla already is one of the largest employers in Austin, where it now will be based, and it has created 5,000 new jobs there in 2021, the most of any company. Elon Musk’s ongoing complaints about Alameda County, Calif., have been the subject of headlines and litigation, and have produced more than a few of Musk’s pungent tweets. Among his biggest complaints has been the county’s shuttering his factories as part of its aggressive anti-COVID efforts. But Musk tells shareholders his reason for relocating to Austin is a problem that California had been suffering long before the epidemic and will continue suffering long after it: outrageously expensive housing. The trick for Austin is managing to keep itself attractive to California companies without becoming California. Already living in the most expensive city in Texas, Austinites say they are happy to have Tesla but worry that local housing prices will start to take on a Californian character. Texas has a solution that California too often has taken off the table: build more housing.

• A new California law requires stores selling children’s toys to shelve at least part of them in “gender-neutral” displays, and to include in these displays a “reasonable sample” of the toys sold in other, less enlightened areas of the store. The rationale for this law is that grouping toys according to which gender is “traditionally” associated with them sends sexist messages to tender minds. Never mind that most stores long ago stopped putting chemistry sets in a section marked “Boys” and tea sets in a section marked “Girls.” What legislators haven’t figured out is how to stop the boys from using fairy wands as swords.

• New York City’s gifted-and-talented public-education programs have long been an engine of social mobility, especially for children of immigrants. But as one of the final actions of his historically unpopular mayoral tenure, Bill de Blasio is making one last attack on them, citing insufficient enrollment from racial minorities. The principal beneficiaries of these programs are Asian Americans, but their academic outperformance seems to disqualify them from minority status. The apparent goal is to have New York City schools fail all kids equally.

• On October 8, 135 countries agreed to the global tax deal that Joe Biden and Janet Yellen have long wanted. It would establish a global minimum corporate-tax rate of 15 percent and subject multinational businesses to more tax jurisdictions. The deal allegedly responds to a “race to the bottom” in corporate-tax rates that has in reality been more of a slow glide to the middle. After steadily declining for decades, the worldwide average corporate-tax rate has settled at around 25 percent, and the most common statutory rates are between 20 and 25 percent. The Biden administration wants to raise corporate taxes above that average, so it wants less competition from low-tax countries. Large, powerful countries shouldn’t force smaller, weaker countries to adopt tax policies that facilitate the large countries’ extraction of revenue from corporations. In any other context, the Left would cry, “Imperialism!”

• U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced that the Biden administration will maintain the Trump-era tariffs on China while also beginning a “targeted tariff-exclusion process.” But keeping the bulk of these tariffs is the wrong approach. The tariffs have harmed American businesses while failing to dissuade Beijing from the damaging trade practices – intellectual-property theft, forced technology transfers, and industrial subsidies among them – that prop up Chinese companies. It’s promising that Tai paid lip service to confronting the Chinese over these issues, which Trump’s trade agreement barely touched. But it’s not clear that Tai and other officials have much of an alternative strategy in mind. Tai even suggested that “a kind of recoupling” of the U.S. and Chinese economies might be the way to go. In sum, the Biden policy is to speak softly while hitting ourselves with a stick.

• In its campaign to destroy the Uyghur people, the Chinese Communist Party has systematically used torture. Now the confession of a Chinese police detective – living in exile in Europe – has corroborated previous accounts from survivors of the internment camps and added horrifying details. In an interview with CNN, he described how police officers rounded up thousands of Uyghur men, women, and children as young as 14, detained them, and tortured them until they confessed to imaginary crimes against the state, after which they would be transferred to camps. The methods differed, he recalled: beatings, rape, electrocutions, and other stomach-churning acts of barbarity. Had he refused to go along, he would have been arrested, he said, but: “I am guilty.”

• In an interview on French television, White House climate envoy John Kerry revealed that Joe Biden had not been “aware” of what had caused a recent U.S. diplomatic fiasco with France. In September, the French government went so far as to recall its ambassador to Washington over an agreement between the U.S., the U.K., and Australia on nuclear-powered submarines that left the French out in the cold. According to Kerry, however, this was all news to the president. “He asked me – he said, ‘What’s the situation?’” Kerry told a shocked French journalist. “And I explained exactly – he had not been aware of that. He literally had not been aware of what had transpired.” We can readily believe that observation; we just can’t believe Kerry made it in public.

• The good energy system must be both cheap and reliable. In large swaths of Europe, it has become very expensive and is getting less reliable. Last year’s bad weather, the post-pandemic recovery, and various government restrictions on energy production are combining to make for a harsh winter. The U.K. is in the worst position in Europe. It still is heavily dependent on gas but, for reasons of climate policy, has underinvested not only in gas production (the Brits still have quite a bit) but also in storage. Meanwhile, it has overinvested in renewables – and these have not delivered this summer. It is quite possible that power will be rationed this winter. In the meantime, prices have rocketed. There will be no better country to host COP-26, this November’s green jamboree. Preferably if the lights are out.

• Maria Ressa is a leading journalist in the Philippines – the co-founder of the news site Rappler, a thorn in the side of Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine strongman. Duterte has bragged of killing journalists. (“Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch.”) Dmitry Muratov is the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, a rare independent newspaper in Russia. Six of his colleagues have been murdered, including Anna Politkovskaya, killed on Vladimir Putin’s birthday in 2006. Like Politkovskaya – and others on the roll of the dead – Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov are exceptionally brave. They have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. This award is also meant to honor press freedom, which is under constant attack, and which is key to democracy and genuine peace. Well done all around.

• Babi Yar is a broad and open ravine more than 500 yards long on the northern edge of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. In the course of two days in September 1939, units of the S.S. and men from German police battalions rounded up the Jews of Kyiv, marched them all along the ravine, stripped them of their clothes, and shot them dead. Just under 34,000 victims were buried in the biggest mass grave of the war. When the Soviets were once more in control, they refused to put up a memorial on the specious grounds that Jews were Soviet citizens like everyone else and were not to be singled out. Volodymyr Zelensky, Isaac Herzog, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, respectively presidents of Ukraine, Israel, and Germany, have now attended the inauguration of a memorial center. A statement from this center said of the perpetrators of the crime, “They were between 20 and 60 years old. They were educated and uneducated. They included engineers and teachers, drivers and salespeople. Some were married and some were not. The vast majority of them returned to live a normal life after the war.” If ever a place deserved a memorial, it is Babi Yar.

• “Come you not from Newcastle? Come you not there away?” The Saudi state does not come from Newcastle. But it is buying Newcastle United, the Premier League soccer club. According to reports, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman lobbied Prime Minister Boris Johnson to facilitate the sale. (The British government denies any role in the matter.) The Saudi government – however much needed as an ally on the international-relations level – is one of the nastiest governments around. This was confirmed by the spectacularly evil Khashoggi murder. Dictatorships love to buy up entities in free countries and swan around in those countries. The people of Newcastle should just say no.

• Two transgender doctors are sounding alarms about the reckless treatment of children identifying as transgender. The author Abigail Shrier interviewed a clinical psychologist and vaginoplasty surgeon for Common Sense with Bari Weiss. They are both concerned about puberty blockers for children and the suppression of dissent in their field. Confirming this second point, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) – on whose board they both serve – then issued a statement “oppos[ing] the use of the lay press as a forum for scientific debate of these issues.” The New York Times had previously rejected an op-ed from the psychologist, saying it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.” And that’s why you read so little about trans issues in that august newspaper.

• Dorian Abbot is a professor in the department of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. In recognition of his research, MIT selected him to give its annual John Carlson Lecture – an event meant to “communicate exciting new results in climate science to the general public.” Almost as soon as the lecture was announced, a campaign to cancel it began. Students called on the university to retract its invitation. Like clockwork, the university acquiesced, alerting Abbot that the event had been shut down “to avoid controversy.” What, exactly, was his offense? In August, he co-authored a piece in Newsweek wherein he critiqued current diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on campus. Abbot advocated, to take their place, “an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.” The sentiment, while controversial within our largely progressive academy, is eminently reasonable and widely shared among the public. That it served as the basis for MIT’s decision to cancel the lecture is shameful, not least because of the dangerous precedent that it sets. Thankfully, the short-term resolution was promising: Professor Robert P. George arranged for Abbot’s lecture to be given at Princeton on the day it was scheduled to be given at MIT.

• Bright Sheng is a leading composer of today, and he teaches at the University of Michigan’s music school. Born in Shanghai in 1955, he was eleven when Mao’s Cultural Revolution began. The revolutionaries took away the boy’s piano as a bourgeois relic. This semester, Sheng was teaching a course on turning a play into an opera – specifically, Shakespeare’s Othello. He showed the 1965 film version of Othello, starring Laurence Olivier, who is in blackface. Some students denounced Sheng for showing the movie, and the professor apologized, abjectly. He is no longer teaching the course. His name is now stained, at least in the university environment. Some onlookers have said that Bright Sheng has faced a cultural revolution in Ann Arbor. The consequences were a thousand times worse in China – but you can’t really blame people for thinking of the comparison.

• Delightful though it was to watch T. J. Hooker shoot into space or not-quite-space (depending on whom you ask), it was better to see William Shatner make his way up to the heavens, and even more so as he is 90. Ninety! It’s easy to imagine that some people two or three decades his junior might have balked, but Shatner boldly went. To some, even beyond the ranks of the killjoys and the scolds, this has been nothing more than a cheesy, carbon-emitting publicity stunt. Not to others. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Blue Origin, the craft that transported Shatner into the sky, is a lifelong sci-fi buff and Star Trek fan. Shatner may have played a starship captain in Star Trek, but the show in which he starred conveyed a sense of shattered boundaries and of humanity unleashed. These are still his themes.

• After 70 years, the remains of Father Emil Kapaun have been returned to his home state of Kansas. A military chaplain who primarily served in the Korean War, Father Kapaun was known for his tireless devotion in bringing the sacraments to his men despite his multiple near-death experiences and the destruction of his traveling Mass kit. When he was captured by the Chinese army in November 1950 and made to march over 80 miles to a prison camp, he carried other prisoners and encouraged those about to give up. In the squalid camp conditions, Father Kapaun’s deep faith and love for his fellow man kept him from despair, and he was known for his ingenuity in procuring food and medicine for the other prisoners. Father Kapaun fell ill in 1951 and, over the pleas of fellow prisoners, was taken by the camp guards to their “hospital,” where he died of pneumonia. He has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, among other distinctions, and his cause for sainthood is being investigated by the Catholic Church.

• Pakistani by birth, Abdul Qadeer Khan lived in the shadows where the world’s destiny is decided. Whether he was a freelance spy or a Pakistani agent is not known. A specialist engineer, he was employed by a Dutch nuclear-fuel company, and a major breach of security allowed him to steal secret designs of nuclear weaponry. The “Islamic nuclear bomb” was born and successfully tested in 1998. Under cover of running a laboratory, he sold nuclear designs to Iran, Libya, and probably North Korea, which he visited twelve times. Khan’s self-declared motive was hatred of the secular West. Dead of COVID at 87. R.I.P.

• Carlisle Floyd was an American composer, known for his operas. “Floyd’s American roots were deep and widespread,” writes Thomas Holliday, his biographer. “His first immigrant ancestor arrived at Virginia’s Jamestown colony in 1623. Over succeeding generations, most of the family settled in agrarian regions of South Carolina.” Floyd himself was born in a little South Carolina town called Latta. He taught at Florida State University and the University of Houston. His best-known opera, probably, is Susannah, which has a hit aria: “Ain’t it a pretty night?” This aria is tender, rhapsodic, and ultimately thrilling. It also bears an unmistakable American stamp. It will be sung all over the world for as long as people are singing. Carlisle Floyd has died at 95. R.I.P.

• Budge Patty won 46 singles titles in his 15-year tennis career. In 1950 he became only the second American to win both Wimbledon and the French Nationals, earning him the No. 1 world ranking. His nickname he earned by being a stolid boy, disinclined to budge, according to legend. He grew up to be agile enough when it mattered. Born John Edward Patty in Fort Smith, Ark., he moved with his family to Los Angeles and at age 13 began lessons at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. He entered the U.S. Army in 1942 and after the war settled in Paris. “Even as a child I knew I’d like Europe,” he remarked later in life. The International Tennis Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 1977, called him a smart dresser with “Hollywood leading-man good looks.” E. Digby Baltzell, the sociologist who specialized in observations of the American upper class of the era, remarked on the tennis star’s “perfect manners” and “exquisite” style. “The most suave of champions,” British tennis commentator John Barrett called Budge Patty, who, at 97, in Lausanne, Switzerland, died on October 3. R.I.P.

Why We Must Support Taiwan

In July, Xi Jinping marked the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary with an ominous sentiment. “Solving the Taiwan question and realizing the complete reunification of the motherland are the unswerving historical tasks” of the party, he said.

If anyone questioned his sincerity, recent events have eliminated all doubt. As Beijing celebrated another anniversary in early October, the 72nd year of the CCP’s control of China, a record-shattering number of Chinese military aircraft crossed into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone.

In just the first several days of October, China flew 150 military planes into the zone. This figure included sorties by an incredible 56 aircraft, including twelve nuclear-capable bombers, on October 4 alone. That’s a sharp spike since September of last year, when the Taiwanese defense ministry began publicly releasing information on the sorties.

These flights have yet to be accompanied by the sort of mass military mobilization that would suggest an imminent invasion of the island. But Xi and party officials are broadcasting their intent, including through a broader military buildup that has taken decades and is tailored to the task of taking Taiwan and preventing us from defending it. The recent air-defense zone incursions serve at least one clear, near-term purpose – wearing down the Taiwanese military, which scrambles jets to respond to the incursions.

Initially, the Biden administration sounded the appropriate notes to these threatening acts. The State Department issued a statement reaffirming America’s “rock solid” commitment to Taiwan and calling on Beijing to end its pressure campaign.

But President Biden, as is his wont, soon caused confusion. He told reporters that during a call, he and Xi said they’d abide by “the Taiwan agreement,” mystifying observers. He might have been making a clumsy reference to America’s One China policy, which would be a misstep, since Beijing likes to pretend its claims to Taiwan are recognized under its own “One China principle.”

Meanwhile, the presence in the region for exercises of two U.S. aircraft carriers, alongside a British carrier and a Japanese destroyer, was reassuring. In fact, their maneuvers might have been one of Beijing’s motives for the spate of incursions.

U.S.-aligned countries are projecting strength, and growing Japanese and Australian coordination is encouraging. Unless the status quo changes, though, including an urgent effort to arm the Taiwanese with missiles, mines, and unmanned vehicles to make a cross-strait invasion riskier, the People’s Liberation Army stands a disturbingly high chance of succeeding at swallowing Taiwan.

Ultimately, the latest intimidation efforts fit with the party’s broader effort to isolate Taiwan by picking off its few diplomatic allies, blocking it from all participation at the U.N., launching an economic bullying campaign, and flooding the island with disinformation. Beijing couldn’t be clearer about its intentions. We must act accordingly.