Thought I’d link to this article from CNN with a slightly different perspective. Not sure I agree with this articles take, but found it interesting anyway:
Yeah, XT, some people still think that way. But that writer is literally arguing for the collapse of treaties and for nuclear proliferation. For what? For later treaties? For greater fiscal problems faced by rival nations due to an arms race? What?
No, this argument is silly. Reagan-apologism and jingoism carried forward to justify hare-brained ignorance and recklessness.
I’ve never heard of the typist of that article, but talk about missing the point altogether.
The point about Europe having an embarrassing diplomatic failure by not being able to convince Trump not to withdrawal is just… bizarre. It’s like saying that a wife should be embarrassed that her husband stepped out to cheat on her. In what way does Europe have the power or obligation to save the United States from itself?
Further, the mildly enamored talk of the U.S. throwing in with Israel and Saudi Arabia is also weird. Okay, Saudi is the least reliable of the bunch… but no mention of the plainly obvious point that U.S. interests with Europe run far deeper than those that bind the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia? Talk about missing the whole fucking point! The U.S. is enmeshed in Europe to a degree so much greater than it is to the Middle East… its like trading down in terms of power centers.
That op/ed was weird. Not in the “I think your politics are loony” way, but in the “did you put five minutes of thought into that article, and were you drunk when you wrote it?” sort of weird.
We didn’t make any deal.
So we made a commitment, which Trump has now backed out on, against the wishes of our European allies, meaning we are now in a position to either sanction our allies or looking even weaker than we already did.
No, we did not. The previous administration did, on its own.
Iran has been ruled by hardline ayatollahs since 1979, but here we change the House and 1/3 of the Senate every two years, and the President every 4 or 8 years. Politics change, often back and forth.
What if President Trump makes a “non-binding political commitment”? Is President Warren/Booker/Harris prohibited from changing it?
Huh? Trump made a choice. What I said was accurate. I never said he couldn’t make that choice, I’m saying his choice was stupid and made our country weaker and increased the danger to us.
Whether you like it or not, everyone else involved in the deal thinks the United States made a deal. The peculiarities of U.S. law don’t mean shit to other other countries. The government of the United States of America made a deal, and so the other parties perceive the deal as being reneged upon.
Nor does anyone else care that it was a different administration. No one gives a shit. In fact, one administration holding up the deals made by previous ones is pretty much expected. the PERSON does not matter; the OFFICE matters. Doandl Trump himself clearly doesn’t understand this, but what matters regarding a decent country with logical laws is that the President made an agreement. Makes no different what the President’s last name was, or whether the last name of the current office holder is different from the last one. What a ridiculous world we’d live in if states and organizations could renege on agreements because there was turnover in the corner office.
Get one fact straight: Trump didn’t “change” the JCPOA; the petulant fuck took his bat and ball home.
That said, IF Trump, by some miraculous circumstance and sheer dumb luck, enters into an agreement identical to the JCPOA with North Korea, I would certainly advise/expect the next administration to adhere to the terms of that agreement and, in the long term, continue to work on improving whatever shortcomings may exist in such an agreement.
Then what did Trump withdraw the U.S. from, if the U.S. never entered anything?
Well, that seems to be the rub. AFAIK (and I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong), Congress didn’t sign off on this, so the US wasn’t actually committed to anything wrt future administrations. Personally, I think we should have stayed in the agreement, but as it wasn’t a formal treaty ratified by the Congress it gave Trump and his administration the wiggle room to do what they did. Since according to the Wiki link cited for this the Republicans were pretty much uniformly against this (probably as much because it was an Obama initiative as that they thought it was a bad deal, IMHO anyway) it’s not surprising that Trump used this as low hanging fruit he could go after to look like he was doing something.
Yeah, the problem isn’t that we don’t understand that what he did was legally permissible, it’s that it was a bad idea.
Not just for the Iran part of it, that’s bad enough that they are now free to resume building nuclear weapons. But largely because the united states will not be trusted in further deals by the rest of the world. This hurts us, and not just a little bit.
Well, it would hurt any future deals done in this way, I’d say. Basically, deals ratified by the Congress wouldn’t be susceptible to the same sort of change in direction by a new administration, so not sure that it would be a US trust issue per se. Frankly, countries should insist on full blown treaties if they want assurances that the US is planning to stay the course for something like this, as obviously administrations come and go, and in the current environment between Democrats and Republicans there isn’t going to (necessarily) be any honoring of any agreements by a previous administration by a future one especially if there is a party change.
I don’t know how badly this will hurt us, to be honest…on the scale of other things that have been done it’s more like the death by a thousand cuts than a mortal wound in and of itself.
If those other countries don’t understand how our political system works, and it not working they way they imagine affects them, perhaps they should spend more time learning about it. I suspect that most of the top-level diplomats in those countries do, in fact, understand the difference between a treaty (signed by the president and ratified by the Senate), a piece of legislation (passed by Congress and signed by the president), and a non-binding political commitment made by the president alone. And if they didn’t before, they almost certainly do now.
If the agreement is between the state, following the procedure outlined in the state’s laws, then they should expect it will not be reneged on. If the agreement is the equivalent of a backroom deal with the person occupying the corner office at the time, and sealed with nothing more than a handshake, they they should not expect it to be a particularly lasting agreement once their man in the corner office is gone.
Here’s the lesson HD thinks the rest of the world should learn from Obama’s “phone and pen” wheelings and dealings: If you want a lasting agreement with the USA, you should push for it to take the form of either a formal treaty, ratified by the Senate, or a piece of legislation enacted by Congress. If you don’t mind that the agreement might not last past the current president’s term, then go ahead and strike a “non-binding political commitment” with him, and you might luck out and the next guy will stick with it, or you might not. That’s the risk you take by pursuing those easier, but less-durable types of agreements.
Get one fact straight: don’t attribute things to me that I never said.
You are right that countries will insist on getting full blown treaties, and as that is something that is difficult to do, and involves the senate, and not the executive, it sounds like other countries should be dealing negotiating with the senate. Of course, the constitution explicitly gives that power to the executive, so that’s a bit hard to rectify.
Prior to trump, presidents usually honored multinational agreements, even if not ratified by the senate. With this change, it will be much harder for future administrations (and this one) to make deals and treaties, even ones that ultimately would be ratified by the senate.
Exactly correct.
And the lesson that they will take is that we should be sidelined as much as possible, as we are incapable of creating such agreements.
What do you think would have been needed to be changed to get the iran deal through the senate? Is there anything at all that would have?
If not, then is there a point to even asking the US to come to the table to negotiate, if they know that it will be completely pointless?
It’s all well and good that we play these little semantic games, and try to get one over on anyone that we can, but it actually does hurt us. It hurts our reputation, it hurts our resources, it hurts our economy. We won’t be the big bullies to push everyone else around for much longer. We are losing, fast, any advantage that we have over any other country. We seems to think that other countries need to deal with us on our terms, but that’s not the case for many, and fewer and fewer are going to fall for our gimmicks and threats.
Why deal with the US, when China can actually honor their agreements? That’s the lesson that the world is taking from this.
Trump has changed a lot of things that were done in the past but unofficial (like trash talking previous presidents/administrations), but I think we were headed toward this anyway since the rancor between the political parties has just gotten increasingly worse over time.
That said, I think any country who would knowingly ride so much politically on this sort of agreement was setting themselves up for failure down the line. While perhaps Iran doesn’t know our system that well, the Europeans certainly should have known that only luck would (or the election of Hillary) would have prevented this agreement from being taken down by a future administration. The Republicans, after all, were opposed to this, so it’s really not surprising that they would move to take it down if they got back into a position to do so.
The theory (or at least one theory) behind the super-majority Senate ratification requirement for treaties is that the USA should not commit itself to agreements with other countries that do not enjoy broad support within the country (because this lack of broad-based support is more likely to result in the USA abandoning the agreement as political winds shift). Obama decided to ignore this when he made a non-binding political commitment with the JCPOA over the opposition of the other major political party, and now we can see some of the limitations of that type of agreement. I’m pretty sure people warned him about this at the time.