José Niño | The Libertarian Institute

American Efforts to Separate Russia from China are Doomed to Fail

by José Niño | Mar 20, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, there was an initial sense of hope that he would wind down the conflict in Ukraine. However, continued flows of military aid to Ukraine and slow progress in the negotiations still make a lasting peace settlement a distant prospect. The Trump administration's preference would be to conclude the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and shift its geopolitical gaze to Asia to contain China. The icing on the cake would be for the United States to have Russia break its “no limits partnership” with China to isolate the East Asian giant. In...

The Mass Expulsion of Palestinians Will Not Be a ‘Cake Walk’

by José Niño | Mar 4, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Contrary to what Donald Trump thinks, removing Palestinians from Gaza will not be an easy task. The United States president shocked the world when he called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 4, 2025. Trump floated the idea of the United States taking over and redeveloping the Gaza Strip as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Throughout this process, Palestinians would be relocated to other Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan with no right of return to Gaza. Israeli Defense Minister Israel...

Is Trump’s Colombia Showdown a Harbinger of Greater Latin American Tensions?

by José Niño | Feb 13, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Since assuming the presidency, Donald Trump has quickly put Latin America on notice. From threatening Mexico and Colombia with tariffs for not adequately dealing with illegal immigration in a way that satisfied the president, to Trump’s threats to take over the Panama Canal for China’s alleged influence over the waterway, U.S. foreign policy is shifting southward. Despite Trump’s aggressive posturing, it seems that tensions have cooled off for now. Mexico agreed to deploy about 10,000 National Guard troops to the southern border to address Trump's concerns about illegal immigration and drug...

Political Instability Looms Amid Israel-Hamas Ceasefire

by José Niño | Feb 3, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On January 15, 2025, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement, bringing Israel’s punitive military campaign in the Gaza Strip to a temporary halt. While this agreement will allay tensions in the short-term, Israel will soon be confronted with tensions on multiple fronts. The latest ceasefire resembles various attempts that have been pursued since November 2023—when a truce temporarily stopped combat in Gaza, although this cessation in hostilities came about in a different political and strategic landscape. The November 2023 truce saw the Israelis and Hamas agree to a temporary...

What Will a Trump Second Term Mean for Russian-American Relations?

by José Niño | Jan 22, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Politics

Contrary to the conventional wisdom permeating across alternative media, a second Trump administration is likely going to be much more hawkish than expected. Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), revealed in an ABC News interview that the administration will be pressuring Ukraine to lower its conscription age from twenty-five to eighteen to continue the NATO-sponsored proxy war against Russia. “The other thing we are going to need to see is really stabilizing things on the battlefield. And one of the things we’ll be asking of the Ukrainians is, they have real...

Pulling Decentralization from the Ruins of ‘Liberal Democracy’

by José Niño | Mar 16, 2022 | Featured Articles

So-called liberal democracies have characterized the West for the past century and are viewed as the pinnacle of political development. So much so that Western elites are firmly convinced that this system of governance should be spread far and wide—be it indirectly (color revolutions) or directly (economic sanctions, kinetic military actions, or nation-building expeditions). Liberal democracies are political systems in which people entrust political power to a political class that, at least on paper, is constitutionally limited when it comes to exercising political power. Further, liberal...

We Must Not Repeat Cold War Errors

by José Niño | Feb 28, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

With Russia launching a military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the corporate press has grown shrill in its calls for punishing Russia with draconian sanctions, supplying Ukraine with increased military aid, and diplomatically isolating the Eurasian power as much as possible. The Two Minutes Hate against Russia has been cranked up to eleven, making any nuanced analysis of why the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has reached such a point almost impossible. The failure of policy wonks to understand why Russia took decisive action against Ukraine is emblematic of a flawed grand...

Is NATO the Old Man of Europe?

by José Niño | Feb 21, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

While geopolitical commentators are fixated on Russia’s border with Ukraine, a more interesting development is slowly boiling underneath the surface of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that could potentially reorder international relations—namely, the death of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Founded in 1949, NATO began with only twelve member nations. Presently, NATO counts on thirty member nations, with national security elites in the Anglo-American sphere wanting to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the fold. In both countries’ cases, NATO membership is in limbo. Despite calls for...

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