I'm John Bachelor with Professor Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College, the headline in Reuters these last hours.

Panama asked China for respect after ship detentions tied to ports ruling.

That's complicated enough. Let's get it more tangled up. Subhead, Reuters.

Panama's top diplomat set a rise in inspections and detentions of Panama-flagged

vessels in China stemmed from a Panama court ruling against Hong Kong-based C.K. Hutchinson

and asked China, Panama asked China, to respect its sovereign affairs. Okay.

What I remember about this is that China does not want to walk away from having secured access

to the Panama Canal.

That looks to be a very dim hope now because the Supreme Court in Panama ruled that the deal that had been

made past the ports at both one side and the other side of the Panama Canal. That deal had been

regarded as illegitimate and therefore C.K. Hutchinson did not have the right to these ports.

In the meantime, there was dealing with an

American company, BlackRock, I believe, but now I get lost. Where are we in this transfer of

authority of those ports? And where is China in this, what appears to be lawfare? What do they

want? Well, John, for me, the bigger picture, even beyond Panama itself, is how China has always

quietly but very skillfully used pressure, oftentimes pressure and threats behind the scene

to advance its interests.

You can go all the way back, for example, to countries like Argentina back in about 2010

when they tried to put too many anti-dumping cases on Chinese companies.

Suddenly, the Chinese cut off importations of Argentine soy products, putting at risk a $2 billion

a year flow of goods.

There are a number of other areas where the Chinese have done that

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