Military.com's account of the Trump-Xi package counts eight goals and then notes that the military safeguards remain incomplete. The article is a short inventory, but the order of the ledger matters. A goal is an entry. A safeguard is the procedure that makes an entry bind, or, more precisely, the procedure that tells a ship captain or a squadron commander what to do when the entry is tested.

Start with whose books this lands on. The eight goals reach the commercial and diplomatic desks, which can price them. The summit ended without a trade agreement, and the Taiwan demand Xi carried to Washington went unanswered. Those gaps are visible in the people who lose money on them. The military line has no such desk. Nothing on the defence side of either government marks it to market, so an unfinished safeguard goes on looking finished until the day it is used.

That day has been arriving on a schedule. Since the summit, the People's Liberation Army has drilled around Scarborough Shoal, a Chinese research ship has been reported probing waters near the Diaoyutai islands (the Senkakus, to Tokyo), and Global Times reports the China Coast Guard on patrol east of Taiwan. Twenty-one Chinese flights circled the island in the period covered by the operativmm report. Each of these is a test of a line the safeguards were meant to draw.

Beijing's own messaging shows which side of the page it reads first. Bastille Post carries the official line that opposing Taiwan separatism serves the interests of both China and the United States. That sentence restates the Taiwan demand as a shared interest. It is a claim on the diplomatic ledger, and it arrives while the military ledger beneath it is blank.

Taipei is reading the same gap from the other direction. WION reports Taiwan building a drone force because the summit left the island's future unresolved. A government that buys hardware after a summit has decided the paper will not carry the weight.

The economic goals can be wrong and be corrected, because the desks that price them will say so within weeks. The military safeguards cannot be priced, so nobody will say so until a test goes badly. The PBOC's open-market desk and the Treasury desks that follow it will see the trade and liquidity entries settle or fail first. The safeguard text has no such clock, and it is the one that most needs one.