This isn’t the outcome President Trump anticipated, now 15 months into his trade war with China. Chinese President Xi Jinping this Tuesday will stage the mother of all military parades through central Beijing, celebrating not only the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic — but also underscoring his quest for “national rejuvenation” and global leadership.

Lenin did more than anyone else to shape the last hundred years. He invented a form of government we have come to call totalitarian, which rejected in principle the idea of any private sphere outside of state control. To establish this power, he invented the one-party state, a term that would previously have seemed self-contradictory since a party was, by definition, a part. An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state.

Hoover Institution fellow Lanhee Chen discusses trade tensions between the US and China.

It has been commonly observed that polarization in America has increased greatly in recent years. It is hard to disagree, given the rancorous political discourse we witness on a daily basis between the two major political parties, not to mention among many friends and neighbors. However, it is useful to remind ourselves that the current polarization is not completely new or unprecedented in scale.