The People’s Republic of China is avidly intent on keeping its bargaining chips, of which two truly important ones are its TikTok app and its port businesses at each end of the Panama Canal.

What gets lost, even ignored, in this, though, is that bargaining chips have only the value the bargainee assigns to them, not what the holder of the chips claims to be their value. Not a red sou more than that.

TikTok, for instance, can be viewed as utterly without value as a chip to be played: current US law requires it to be shut down entirely and banned from the US unless and until it is sold in toto to an entity not under the control of the PRC. The only thing standing in the way of that way is the law’s provision that the deadline for sale can be moved back if our Federal government deems negotiations for the sale to be making sufficient progress. That’s where things stand under President Donald Trump, and that confers exactly zero value to the app as a PRC chip.

So it is, nearly, with those PRC businesses that are Panama Canal bookends. A BlackRock-led group has concluded a deal to purchase those two port businesses along with a number of others around the world from CK Hutchison Holdings, a PRC-domiciled (Hong Kong) company. The PRC is actively interfering to delay and potentially prevent that deal from coming to fruition. The appropriate response here is for the US to restrict, even block as far as may be, the ability of those two ports to get any business from the US or any other nations. That would deny those ports any value as PRC chips.