In an interview yesterday, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson seemed to imply that the US does not have the same treaty obligations to the Eastern European members as to the original NATO signatories.
I am trying to understand his rationale. The only thing I can figure is that he believes that the protocols by which the new members acceded don’t count as valid amendments to the treaty. But the protocols were all ratified by the Senate by more than a two-thirds supermajority. See, for example, the Senate resolution of May 8, 2003, passed by a vote of 96-0, approving the protocol by which seven Eastern European states all eventually joined NATO. The protocol came into force in 2004 after all member states had ratified it. The resolution document specifies that “The Senate understands that Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, in becoming NATO members, will have all the rights, obligations, responsibilities, and protections that are afforded to all other NATO members.”
Am I misinterpreting Johnson’s words? Am I missing some subtlety of international agreements? Or is Johnson just wrong?
Please don’t turn this into a partisan political debate. I’m looking for a factual answer and nothing else.
He does seem to be a bit confused as regards NATO.
Here is a prior thread which goes into the three main ways that the US can enter international agreements.
As you note, the foundations of NATO and its expansion into Eastern Europe is the strongest of those forms, with a supermajority ratification in the Senate.
Johnson is wrong. The United States has the same treaty obligation to Estonia that it has to Germany.
The North Atlantic Treaty has a procedure for admitting new countries and a procedure for countries withdrawing from the alliance. But there isn’t a procedure for expelling countries from the alliance. So it appears if the United States decided to end its commitment to countries in Eastern Europe it couldn’t do so by expelling them from NATO. Instead, the United States itself would have to withdraw from NATO.
Speaking from a more general international law perspective: Protocols to treaties are, as far as their international law character is concerned, concluded under the same procedure as treaties. They are, in essence, treaties themselves and have the same force. They’re simply called differently, usually because they’re either concluded after the conclusion of the main treaty, amending it, or because they are concluded at the same time as the main treaty but deal with more peripheral issues which, for reasons of readibility, are outsourced to a satellite document, something akin to an annex.
And sometimes there are optional protocols to a treaty, dealing with matters that not all countries wanted included in the main treaty. Countries which want the optional protocol to apply can ratify it in addition to the main treaty. The optional protocol is only binding on the countries which have ratified it as well as the treaty.