Numerology is a potent force in human affairs. So is a deadline—especially when it’s clear fateful consequences will come to pass once the cutoff date arrives. The wry English wit Dr. Samuel Johnson was on to something when he quipped that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

But what happens if you talk yourself into believing a deadline is impending when it’s not? Maybe the executioner is not on a set timetable. An approaching date may concentrate your mind, as Johnson prophesied. And that can be a healthy thing. Deadlines are forcing events. They spur thought and action, compelling you to set aside indecision and sloth. But, perversely, a deadline might goad you into doing something rash—something with dire strategic and political import—in hopes of eluding the hangman’s noose. And then you’ll be stuck with the consequences of your actions—potentially, consequences of cataclysmic proportions.

Even though the hangman was never coming for you in the first place. Being decisive could be self-defeating.

Such are the dangers of a phantom cutoff date. Now to the news. Here are two numbers that have come to fixate officialdom in Washington, DC over the past few years: six and 2027. Both originated in a single committee meeting in Congress. In 2021, while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, outgoing U.S. Indo-Pacific Command chief Philip Davidson reported that “Beijing is pushing across the globe to diplomatically isolate, economically constrain, and militarily threaten Taiwan.”

No kidding.

That was abundantly true then, and it had been for some time. Fully twenty years ago, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) magnates transcribed their threat to use arms into Chinese domestic law in the form of an “Anti-Secession Law.” The law set the conditions under which China would use force and made—surprise, surprise—CCP leaders the arbiters of whether those conditions had been met. Nor was this mere bombast on Beijing’s part. In the ensuing years, as Chinese military might has swelled, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has taken to deploying sea and air power around the island. As a matter of........

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