Joseph Solis-Mullen

Sanctioning China in a Taiwan Crisis: Scenarios and Risks

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jul 25, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Last month the DC hawks’ favorite think tank, the Atlantic Council, released their long anticipated study “Sanctioning China in a Taiwan Crisis: Scenarios and Risks.” Produced in collaboration with the Rhodium Group, the final product is a highly detailed forty page analysis, informed not only by theoretical considerations but significant time spent by the authors talking with policymakers in G7 governments. Broken up into sections respectively devoted to detailing the different range of sanctions available, their probable impacts, and the hypothetical challenges to their implementation, the...

Defending the Defensible: Free Trade and Economic Liberalism

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jul 13, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In 1989, the economist John Williamson introduced the phrase “Washington Consensus” to the politico-economic lexicon. It was shorthand for a set of interrelated policies that, taken together, would free trade within states and between them while boosting overall economic outcomes by freeing the productive forces of society from the stultifying effects of statist managerial policies. These were, in no particular order: Fiscal discipline, in the form of balanced budgets. Tax reform, in favor of lower marginal tax rates. Abandonment of fixed exchange rates in favor of competitive,...

The Fake China Threat, Then and Now

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jul 5, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Republicans are terrible on China. Examples abound, but perhaps the most instructive illustration of this long-term handicap comes from the following quotation: “We must be prepared to go it alone in China if our allies desert us. We must not fool ourselves into thinking we can avoid taking up arms with the Chinese Reds. If we don’t fight them in China and Formosa [Taiwan] we’ll be fighting them in San Francisco, in Seattle, in Kansas City."Quoted from Chapter Ten, “World Affairs, 1953-1956,” of historian James T. Patterson’s Grand Expectations: the United States, 1945-1974, Volume Ten...

An Archaeology of Nineteenth Century American Expansion

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jun 27, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Last week, context was added to Murray Rothbard’s assertion in Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy that American foreign policy underwent an abrupt shift during the second Cleveland administration (1893-1897). I argued that American foreign policy from that period on, far from being a radical departure from what had come before, was the natural outgrowth or logical extension of previous expansionist policies. In this reading, the drive to conquer the best of the North American continent, having been declared officially settled in 1890, was simply turned abroad in a series of...

In Search of a New Abroad: Contextualizing Developments in U.S. Foreign Policy in the Late 19th Century

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jun 20, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Was America Destined to be an Empire? While Murray Rothbard is correct in Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy that “the great turning point of American foreign policy came in the early 1890s, during the second Cleveland administration,” this needs qualification; for though, as Rothbard continues, “it was then that the U.S. turned sharply and permanently from a foreign policy of peace and non-intervention to an aggressive program of economic and political expansion abroad,” an examination of the wider context reveals that this was less an aberration attributable to the...

Examining the Foreign Policy Establishment’s ‘British Connection’

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jun 12, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In 1877, before he had made his fortune via the founding of De Beers Consolidated Mines and the British South Africa Company, the imperialist par excellence Cecil Rhodes had dictated a part of his will thusly: “[To make provision] for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world.” This was to include, “The ultimate recovery of the United States of America.” This grandiose vision was pragmatically tempered in the...

A Few Thousand Years of Chinese Foreign Policy (In a Nutshell)

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | May 23, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

An examination of Chinese foreign policy historically lends little support to those who depict China as secretly plotting to take over the world. Rather, it points to an entity preoccupied with managing its complex, local strategic environment and internal security concerns. While no single article devoted to the subject can comprehensively make such a case in detail, a few general observations are worth pointing out for their relation to the present. Despite what proponents of the New Red Scare would have us believe, China and its nominally communist leadership have for decades acted in a...

Taking Notes Out of Rothbard’s Taiwan Playbook

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | May 16, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Writing pseudonymously in a series of articles for Faith and Freedom in the 1950s, Murray Rothbard took on the question of whether or not the United States should defend Formosa (Taiwan) from attack by mainland China. While his conclusions will surprise no one familiar with his work (that war is the health of the state, that individuals concerned with the fate of Taiwan should do as they will privately, but that their lives and property are not for the government to command), a review of the articles’ contents are worthwhile, nonetheless. For apart from such typically memorably Rothbardian...