At a defense forum in Taipei, the de facto American ambassador to Taiwan placed the specter of war in the Taiwan Strait beside the ruins of the twentieth century's greatest catastrophe, warning that such a conflict would exceed even World War II in its economic devastation. His words arrived not in a vacuum but on the eve of a summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump — a meeting that now carries the weight of preventing what diplomats dare not name directly. In the long arc of US-China-Taiwan relations, this moment stands as one where the cost of miscalculation has been made as legible as po