Kaye & LaMotte on “Pacts Americana” and the New Congress

David Kaye and K. Russell LaMotte (along with illustrator Peter Hoey) argue in a recent NY Times op-ed that one way the new Congress can attempt to gain back some of the international good-will that the U.S. has lost is to approve some of the many treaties that have been submitted by a President but are currently languishing.

They explain:

The Senate has before it more than two dozen treaties submitted for approval by President Bush and his predecessors — some, in fact, were negotiated as long ago as the Eisenhower administration. These agreements are not like the Kyoto Protocol on climate change or the statute that established the International Criminal Court, which are too controversial even to be transmitted to the Senate.

Indeed, these are widely supported pacts, making it difficult to discern why many stalled in the first place: perhaps it’s as simple as a senator’s vague concerns about “sovereignty,” a lack of domestic constituency or the press of other legislative business.

Kaye, LaMotte, and Hoey provide an excellent chart describing the status of twelve such treaties. It is a bit embarrassing to see on the list some treaties such as Additional Protocol II of the Geneva Convention, which would apply the basic humanitarian rules to civil wars as well as international wars, on the list despite the fact that, according to the authors there are “[n]o serious objections” from the Senate. One-hundred sixty-two states are parties to AP II. Or the Convention on Biological Diversity, with 190 parties, that has been saddled by concerns by U.S. ranchers that it would hurt land-use freedoms. And of course there’s the small arms convention (that we have discussed on this blog)that attempts to dry-up the illegal small arms trade but is reviled by the NRA. And there are nine more examples.

Becoming a party to a treaty can serve multiple purposes. Besides locking yourself into the actual agreement at the core of the treaty, a state also signals its intentions concerning the policy area as a whole and, at times, its good intentions concerning the international rule of law. We don’t have to join all of these treaties submitted by our Presidents but it is hard to explain why we have joined none of them.