Taiwan's armed forces opened the Han Kuang exercises this week testing US-supplied tactics alongside newly fielded tanks, the most direct rehearsal yet of American doctrine on Taiwanese soil. The drills coincide with a parallel diplomatic track: Steve Daines, the Trump administration's envoy who has carried the Beijing brief since the transition, is heading back to Beijing to finalize the agenda for a Trump-Xi summit. Global Times called the exercise a placebo. Placebos do not require live-fire coordination with a foreign military's tactical manuals, and Han Kuang this cycle does.

The sequencing matters more than either event alone. Washington is rehearsing interoperability with Taipei's forces in the same week its own envoy sits down with Beijing to set summit terms, which means the defense track and the diplomatic track are running on separate clocks with no visible instruction to sync them. If Daines returns with a summit date, the next signal to watch is whether Han Kuang's after-action posture, publicly briefed by Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, gets softened to match the diplomatic calendar or stays as scheduled. A softened readout would be the first hard evidence that Taipei's military planning answers to Washington's China timeline, not the reverse.