Lai Ching-te's office confirmed a late-night evacuation drill this week, the kind of exercise a president's security detail runs when the threat model has moved from theoretical to timetabled. Taiwan's army positioned Abrams tanks at Taoyuan, the island's largest airport and the most obvious point of entry for a PLA airborne seizure, a placement that reads less as deterrence theater than as an admission of where planners think the first hours of a crisis would open.

The rehearsal lands the same week Beijing's new extraterritorial law, giving its courts jurisdiction to prosecute anyone, anywhere, for undermining "ethnic unity," drew a direct comparison from former Canadian deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland to the kinship claims Moscow used to justify invading Ukraine. Washington has not named the act that triggers its Taiwan commitment; Taipei, this week, stopped waiting to find out and began drilling for the answer.