The State Department announced today the cancelation of international travel to all diplomats, citing the ongoing transition to the incoming Biden administration.

Too bad, at least for friends of Free China. Hours earlier

America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly Craft, was scheduled to set off for a trip to Taiwan, where she would have become the highest-ranking American diplomat to ever visit the free country officially named the Republic of China.

Some in Washington, presumably, are relieved. Dealing with Communist China, America’s toughest adversary, will be hard enough without such — as they will insist, echoing Beijing — “provocations.” Mr. Biden, after all, promised to return America’s foreign policy to “normalcy,” which they interpret as more conciliatory diplomacy than President Trump’s. Mr. Biden has also vowed to accelerate cooperative diplomacy at multilateral organizations like the UN.

For Beijing, meanwhile, Ms. Craft’s landing would have proved even more confrontational than similar visits this summer. Secretary of Health Alex Azar and Under State Secretary for Economic Growth Keith Krach popped up in Taipei after Secretary of State Pompeo removed a ban on official trips there. The Chinese mission at the UN has made clear that Beijing considers Ms. Craft’s trip a “crazy provocation.”

Since 1971, when Free China, one of the world body’s founders, was replaced as a UN member by the communist regime, Beijing has been obsessed with erasing any Taiwanese presence there. Communist China’s party bosses consider Taiwan access to any world body a tacit validation of separatist aspirations. Officially, Red China considers the island part of its own territory.

In the past decade, Chinese diplomats have pushed for dominance over key departments at the UN, using it and other international bodies as a diplomatic tool in advancing President Xi’s push to surpass America as world leader. Free China is now even more of a pariah at world forums than in the past.

Government officials aren’t the only ones banned from Turtle Bay. If tourists show a Taiwanese ID at the visitors gate at the UN’s headquarters in New York — even if they’re escorted by an authorized diplomat or UN employee — they’re unceremoniously turned away. Nor are Taipei journalists allowed access, and NGOs are only rarely let in.

No wonder Beijing was livid last week when Ms. Craft’s announced a plan to deliver public remarks in Taipei. Specifically, she promised to highlight “Taiwan’s impressive contributions to the global community and the importance of Taiwan’s meaningful and expanded participation in international organizations.”

Consider: while Taiwan is widely praised for its world-leading effective Covid response, China in 2016 blocked it out of the World Health Organization. In November Beijing and its allies defeated an American attempt to readmit Taiwan’s status as a WHO observer.

Also, too, last week even the Beijing-favored WHO chief, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, chided the Communist regime for denying visas to a team the WHO charged with investigating the pandemic’s origin at Wuhan province.

While Ms. Craft turned Taiwan into a pet cause at the UN, she made clear that nothing about her planned trip would have changed established American policies, citing the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act and past assurances guaranteeing Taiwan’s integrity and security.

China, however, surely saw red.

“We wish to remind the United States that whoever plays with fire will burn himself,” the UN mission of the People’s Republic declared in a statement. It called on Washington to “stop its crazy provocation, stop creating new difficulties for China-U.S. relations and the two countries’ cooperation in the United Nations.”

That language seems directed at some confrontation-averse members of Mr. Biden’s team, who are said to be sick of “jingoistic” policies of the last four years and crave more UN- and European-style diplomacy. Will they have the upper hand when it comes to China?

Incoming National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tweeted on December 21 that the new administration would “welcome early consultations with our European partners on our common concerns about China’s economic practices.” Sure enough, last week the European Union ignored his gentle prodding and signed a new trade deal with China, in which “common concerns” are ignored.

So America should be more worried about European and UN tendencies to kowtow to China than with assertive gestures like Ms. Craft’s now-cancelled Taiwan trip.

Taipei craves American reassurances. It has been watching China’s ugly takeover of Hong Kong in violation of past assurances of political autonomy. It has faced direct provocations from the mainland, such as the one in September, when the Chinese communists marked the visit of Undersecretary Krach by sending 18 military jets into Free Chinese airspace. So the Taiwanese rightly fear that any weakening in America’s resolve could spell the end of their thriving democracy.

According to polls most Taiwanese, by far, preferred a Trump victory in November. Mr. Biden can now prove them wrong by announcing that his nominee for the UN ambassadorship, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, would travel to Taiwan in Ms. Craft’s stead as soon as the Senate confirms the nomination.

By doing so, Mr. Biden would demonstrate that we understand that Free China is the only truly democratic regime in modern Chinese history, and that America’s relation with it is high on his agenda, and so is America need to push back against China’s aspirations of global hegemony.

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Twitter @bennyavni

This story updates an earlier dispatch on the splash that would have resulted had Ambassador Craft proceeded with her planned visit.