SEOUL — Communist China is gearing up for round two in the war games against the independent state of Taiwan while Washington figures out how far to go in defending the island.

For now the Chinese are slowing down the pace of the exercises in which Chinese ships and planes blockaded Taiwan for nearly a week after a visit by Speaker Pelosi and five other members of Congress. The battle, however, is far from over.  Having “completed various tasks,” China’s Eastern Theater Command promised to “keep an eye on the Taiwan Strait, continue to carry out training and preparation for combat,” and “organize regular combat readiness patrols.”

The Taiwan defense ministry said Chinese warships were patrolling the seas while Chinese planes criss-crossed the skies “like flies.” The Chinese, however, have stopped test-firing missiles, and commercial air and sea traffic is resuming.

China began easing the pressure in a blaze of rhetoric that carried a menacing message: It may be game over for now, but we’ll be back for round two. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office warned that the Chinese would “always be ready to respond with the use of force” in order “to guard against external interference and all separatist activities.”

Would China really go to war just because of another visit like that of Mrs. Pelosi? She expressed “solidarity” in a conversation with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, but also affirmed her belief in Washington’s longstanding “one China” policy in which Taiwan, formally the Republic of China, is a province of mainland China, the People’s Republic of China.

“Our ultimate goal is to ensure the prospects of China’s peaceful reunification and advance this process,” the Chinese statement said, repeating a mantra that’s been a cornerstone of Beijing policy ever since Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek led his defeated forces to the island, 100 miles off China’s east coast, while Mao Zedong’s Red army was taking over the mainland in 1949.

One reason for China to intensify the pressure is the congress of the Chinese Communist Party at Beijing in November, at which Xi Jinping will be up for a third term as  president. He’s expected to win easily but clearly needs to show he’s a strongman.

Considering the danger of a war, the exercises have analysts asking if Washington is ready were they to flare into a shooting match — and if China is finally seen as gearing up to invade the island.

The headline of an article posted online Wednesday by an influential journal, Foreign Affairs, reads, “America Must Prepare for a War Over Taiwan.” It is followed by the subheadline, “Being Ready Is the Best Way to Prevent a Fight With China.”

In the article, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, Elbridge Colby, warns, “A war with China over Taiwan has gone from what many regarded as a remote scenario to a fearfully plausible one.”

Mr. Colby, who is now with the Marathon Initiative, a think tank developing strategies for “protracted competition with great power rivals,” also says America “does not appear to be adequately preparing for such a conflict despite a strengthening commitment, especially by the Biden administration, to the island and its autonomy.”  

That’s a reference to President Biden’s oft-stated declaration that the U.S. is committed to the defense of Taiwan even though there’s been no American embassy there since Washington recognized Beijing’s Communist government in 1978. No American troops are on Taiwan, even as advisers, though Taiwan is importing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of American arms.

It would, Mr. Colby goes on, “make sense for Washington to be behaving as though the United States might well be on the verge of major war with a nuclear-armed superpower rival.”

Economic considerations, including China’s enormous trade surplus with the United States, could dissuade China from going to war. American imports from China last year totaled $541 billion, while exports to China stood at $151 billion. Cross-straits trade between China and Taiwan last year totaled $273 billion, with $189 billion in exports, mainly electronics products, to the mainland from Taiwan.

“China will not kill the golden goose,” a scholar here who often comments on China, Lakhvinder Singh, said.

South Korea’s foreign minister, Park Jin, focused on economic cooperation in talks with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, but the two differed on the thorny topic of an American army battery of missiles 200 miles south of Seoul for countering hypersonic missiles fired by North Korea. 

During the talks at Qingdao, on the Yellow Sea, Mr. Wang called on South Korea to observe a pledge by its previous liberal president, Moon Jae-in, not to increase the size of the battery known by the acronym THAAD, for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. Mr. Park said the missiles were for “self-defense” and it was up to South Korea to decide whether to have more of them.

On Thursday, a government spokesman, defying China more emphatically,  called THAAD “a matter of security sovereignty that can never be subject to negotiation.”

Significantly, Messrs. Park and Wang apparently did not discuss Taiwan — a reflection of the South’s desire to remain neutral between China, its biggest trading partner, and America, its historic ally. South Korea’s fear is that a war over Taiwan could spread to the Korean peninsula. That’s considered the reason why South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk-yeol, did not see Mrs. Pelosi after she arrived from Taipei last week.

Correction: The Marathon Initiative is the name of the think tank Elbridge Colby is with. The name was misstated in an earlier version of this article.