The arrival Sunday at Beijing of Secretary of State Blinken will offer a moment to mark the inscrutability of the Biden Doctrine. The president is the only American leader we can think of — and we’ve had some doozies — who labors under the notion that the United States is the party upon whom it’s incumbent to de-escalate tensions between America and Communist China. How he reached that conclusion is a secret between him and his business partners.

Ordinarily we would blame the Secretary of State, but Mr. Blinken is far too smart for that. Mr. Blinken planned to visit China in February only to cancel that plan owing to the discovery that the Chinese were flying spy balloons over our missile silos. Now, just as Mr. Blinken seems ready to try again, an even greater provocation has come to light. The Wall Street Journal writes that the Chinese regime is building in communist Cuba a spy base aimed at America. 

The communist mandarins at Beijing are trying to deny that, but there’s not an upright walking biped who believes them (they’re communists, to start with). The Journal reports that this plan is particularized in a secret agreement with the repressive regime at Havana under which China would establish an “electronic eavesdropping facility on the island” in a “brash new geopolitical challenge” to America.

The Journal attributes its report to officials familiar with “highly classified intelligence.” The facility, 100 miles from Florida, would allow communist Chinese intelligence services to, as the Journal put it, “scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic.” This deal is said to have reached the state of an agreement in principle.

One can only imagine how President Kennedy would have reacted to this. Then again, too, he was assassinated by a gunman who’d recently visited communist Cuba. One could also only imagine how, say, President Monroe might have reacted to the idea of such a Chinese spy base in Cuba. Then again, too, the Monroe Doctrine, under which foreign powers were to stay out of our hemisphere, was declared a dead letter by Secretary of State Kerry.

This was done on November 18, 2013, when Mr. Kerry spoke to the Organization of American States and declared: “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” This was met with applause among the striped-pants set. Mr. Kerry declared that our policy would be “about all of our countries viewing one another as equals, sharing responsibilities, cooperating on security issues, and adhering not to doctrine, but to the decisions that we make as partners …”

It looks like this has been transmogrified into what might be called the Biden Doctrine, on behalf of which Mr. Blinken will travel to Beijing as a tribune. “Now is precisely the time for intense diplomacy,” Mr. Biden’s top Asia adviser, Kurt Campbell, says. A more sober view comes from Congressman Mike Gallagher, who notes America has for 30 years chased “economic engagement” with China, hoping that “growth would lead to political liberalization.”

That has proven a vain wish, Mr. Gallagher observes, and China’s growing wealth “has served only to embolden Mr. Xi’s worst authoritarian instincts.” The Congressman decries this “Zombie Diplomacy” and warns that “the siren song of engagement” runs the risk of “appeasement in the face of foreign aggression.” It also deters Washington from taking “defensive measures,” Mr. Gallagher says, that “might provoke Beijing and endanger détente.”

Mr. Gallagher’s clear-eyed view is borne out by a Reuters report that China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, in a “tense call” with Mr. Blinken, told him “to stop meddling in its affairs and harming its security.” America “should respect China’s core concerns to arrest declining relations,” Mr. Qin lectured. So State is playing down in respect of the trip any “expectations of any breakthrough.” Our instinct is that it would be better to save the jet fuel and stay home.