Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute

Case Study, Taiwan: A Nation is the Story We Tell Ourselves

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Oct 17, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In his famous 1882 lecture "What is a Nation?" the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan emphasized the role of collective memory and even fictitious or selective historical narratives in the creation and maintenance of national identity, writing "Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." What Renan was arguing is that nations are built not only on shared history but also on the myths and selective memories that bind people together. This selective forgetting often involves downplaying or erasing divisive events or highlighting...

Government by Sortition

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Oct 10, 2024 | Featured Articles, Politics

From Plato to Acton, Thomas Jefferson to Bertrand Russell, it was regarded as a truism to many great thinkers that those who desire power are the least to be trusted with it. As such, it is unsurprising that from the first experiments in representative government, sortition—election or enfranchisement by lottery—was the popular method reached for by those who sought to safeguard the state from the entrenched tyranny of those who pursued power for its own sake or to enrich themselves. Indeed, the practice of selecting political officials or decision-makers by lot has a long historical...

Don’t Oversell China’s Economic Crisis

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Oct 3, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Recent headlines regarding China’s economy have painted a grim picture. From sagging stock markets to the continuing, multidimensional real-estate crises, there is no shortage of negative news coming out of the world’s second-largest economy. Yet while these challenges are real and present significant hurdles, it would be a mistake to read too much into the current malaise. China remains a maturing economy with plenty of room for future growth. Of course, its development path will be slower and more uneven, a byproduct of its previous interventionist policies (which promise to continue), as...

Prediction Realized: The Fed Opts for a Rate Cut

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 25, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles

In February of this year, I forecast that the Federal Reserve, despite all the bluster about "higher rates for longer," would eventually blink. Now, following last Wednesday’s FOMC announcement, that prediction has come true. The Committee, in a not-at-all-shocking reversal, has lowered the target range for the federal funds rate by half a percentage point, bringing it to between 4.75% and 5%, with more cuts to come. For those paying attention—and not to the misleading “strong economy” propaganda—this decision was virtually inevitable. As I pointed out earlier this year, the Fed’s only path...

The Case for Pessimism in Sino-American Relations

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 18, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On September 11, the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed by the director of the Asia Engagement Program at Defense Priorities and director of the China Initiative at Brown University, Dr. Lyle Goldstein, on the need for Washington to work to improve its relations with Beijing. Formerly a research professor at the U.S. Naval War College for two decades, Dr. Goldstein retains nothing but respect from this author—referencing him at several points in The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Danger regarding the security situation around the Taiwan Strait. However, I could not but remark upon a few...

A Tale of Two Disputes: How China Handles Hanoi and Manila

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 12, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

A recent article in the South China Morning Post caught my eye—the topic being why Beijing has taken such an apparently different approach to its territorial disputes with Vietnam versus the similar disputes it has with the Philippines. Given the now weekly near misses between competing claimants in the South China Sea, the topic is a timely one, and in analyzing Beijing's contrasting responses to territorial claims by Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea, it becomes clear that China's strategic calculations are shaped by varying historical, political, and diplomatic dynamics....

Democratization as Regime Preservation

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 5, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

When in the 1970s it became increasingly clear Taipei and its allies in the United States were no longer going to be able to postpone Washington’s recognition of the Chinese Communist Party government in Beijing, the longtime dictator of Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek, grasped for a solution to the problem of how his regime was to survive de-recognition as the official government of China. The answer? Democratization. This strategy, which his successors embraced and ultimately fulfilled over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, proved far-sighted. Taiwan’s democratization process began in the late...

The Third Taiwan Straits Crisis and Its Enduring Lesson

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 29, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In the words of Justin Raimondo, from his 2011 article, “How decision-makers react to events beyond our borders is decisively shaped by domestic political considerations.” This theory of foreign relations, libertarian realism, eschews the typical narrative of mysterious collectivist forces that drive events. It thus places blame firmly where it belongs when things, as they so often do, blow up in everyone’s faces: politicians catering to domestic political constituencies, the focus being on their own careers and not a fictitious “national interest.” Using the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis...

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