Suchergebnisse

"American diplomacy is broken. As a result, the United States sits on the sidelines as the remainder of the world writes international law dealing with a host of vexing problems. The source of the dysfunction is domestic politics. Partisan polarization has rendered the domestic treaty process unworkable. Instead, presidents rely entirely on unilateral tools to complete their agreements, making them far weaker and less legitimate. Using a mixed-methods approach, Peake assesses the politics surrounding treaty ratification and the use of unilateral authority since World War Two, with a particular focus on the twenty-first century. He employs original data from 1949 through 2020, including 1,000 treaties and more than 3,000 executive agreements. The analysis provides case studies of the domestic politics of several recent international agreements, including on climate change, Iranian nuclear weapons, security in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights, and the law of the sea"--

"American diplomacy is broken. As a result, the United States sits on the sidelines as the remainder of the world writes international law dealing with a host of vexing problems. The source of the dysfunction is domestic politics. Partisan polarization has rendered the domestic treaty process unworkable. Instead, presidents rely entirely on unilateral tools to complete their agreements, making them far weaker and less legitimate. Using a mixed-methods approach, Peake assesses the politics surrounding treaty ratification and the use of unilateral authority since World War Two, with a particular focus on the twenty-first century. He employs original data from 1949 through 2020, including 1,000 treaties and more than 3,000 executive agreements. The analysis provides case studies of the domestic politics of several recent international agreements, including on climate change, Iranian nuclear weapons, security in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights, and the law of the sea"--

Treaties represent an important policy mechanism in US foreign policy. There are good reasons to expect that the political process underlying treaty ratification in the United States is structured by the partisan political context, the policy context including the policy agenda, and, in the case of bilateral agreements, the relationship between the treaty partners. I analyze the duration of the ratification process for all bilateral treaties transmitted by the president to the Senate from 1949 to 2012. I focus the analysis on two key stages where delay is most common: the presidential transmittal stage and the Senate Foreign Relations committee stage. Analysis indicates that presidential resources, partisan polarization, the broader policy agenda, and the value of the treaty structure presidential decisions on treaty transmittal. I find less support for these factors at the committee stage; however, the committee processes treaties with democracies more quickly than treaties with other states. The results have important implications for US foreign policy.