The clock is running on the TikTok drama, with the next deadline by the end of this week. That’s when Secretary Mnuchin promised that the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States would make a recommendation to President Trump in respect of what to do about the communist Chinese owned video-sharing service that has become wildly popular among Generation Z Americans.

This is a tough choice, pitting, on the one hand, free market principles against, on the other hand, national security. The more we look at it, the more inclined we are to credit the instincts of Secretary of State Pompeo and other hardliners. They are alarmed by the acquisition by Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance of TikTok’s predecessor, the service Musical.ly, which was repackaged and renamed as TikTok.

Late last year, concerned that “the merged companies could give the Chinese government access to vast amounts of American data,” the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States began reviewing the deal. Though CFIUS has veto power over acquisitions that may affect the national security, it failed to review this deal at the time it went through. That increasingly appears to have been a mistake.

It turns out that the year before, the communist National People’s Congress put on the books a law requiring Chinese firms — as well as those that operate within the People’s Republic — to hand over any user information for which the government asks. The communist “legislature” earlier this month started work on an even more draconian law, just in time for the Trump administration to double down.

TikTok denies that its American users’ information is vulnerable to Beijing’s eyes. It stores the data on servers at Virginia and Singapore, both beyond the reach of China’s cybersecurity law. Its own privacy policy, though, states, “We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group.” If and when ByteDance gets hold of TikTokers’ private information, that looks like the end of it.

The communists can make plenty of mischief with the Gen Z and other data, even without the new Cold War turning nastier than it is. Gen Z, with whom the app is hugely popular, will be the generation fighting such a war. Take as precedent the Battle of Vietnam, when the communists boasted of infiltrating our peace movement and of helping force the Congress to abandon a fight we were winning on the ground.

Take that thought and use on it the multiplier the digital age has given to data. Some, like Times tech journalist Kara Swisher, might roll their eyes at these concerns. Though she recently acknowledged that she’s “extra wary” about TikTok, she declared herself not to be “faux indignant with a Mike Pompeo-level of alarm” and wrote off administration officials’ recent comments as “disingenuous threats” and “bluster.”

Yet the Red Chinese regime has shown itself prepared to harass its own expatriates. These efforts have targeted Chinese nationals living and working in the West, as well as other individuals who have displeased the regime.It’s no stretch to worry that they’d redouble these efforts in wartime. Our instinct is that the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Mead has the better part of wisdom when he warns of China marrying a resurgent neocommunism with tech savvy.

Even the Washington Post plumps for America to “pull whatever levers it can to ensure that a country that will not allow democracy in is unable to push authoritarianism outward.” One can imagine all sorts of approaches. (When Cuba’s communists nationalized its cigar brands, America granted the trademarks to new businesses, who still manufacture Montecristos, Partagas and “Red Dot” Cohibas elsewhere.) We’re not particular about exactly which hardline policy might emerge on Tik Tok. It would nice, though, to see the Republicans and the Democrats unite on something — for once.