ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The Trump administration is reportedly reviewing all current and pending multilateral treaties, with a view to exiting those that are not in the national interest.
This is a long-overdue step. More than 40 treaties are pending in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, many of them gathering dust there for decades.
Some may think that a treaty can do no harm if it’s just sitting in the Senate. After all, doesn’t the Senate have to approve a treaty before it becomes U.S. law? Sort of, but not really.
Once a president signs a treaty, the U.S. holds itself bound not to violate the treaty’s “object and purpose.” In practice, that vague phrase means that a presidential signature is almost, though not quite, the same as Senate approval.
So pending treaties aren’t harmless: They bind us in ways that allow a lot of room for mischief.
And there’s another consideration: Someday, another progressive will be president. Clearing the inbox now will make it harder for that administration to push these bad treaties through.
Not all pending treaties are bad. Many deserve a hearing, and some should likely receive the Senate’s consent. But some, including these five, should be discarded ASAP.
• The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Signed by President Clinton in 1996, CTBT seeks to promote nuclear disarmament. Unfortunately, North Korea, Russia, Pakistan and others don’t share that objective. The Senate rejected CTBT by 51-48 in 1999.
But Senate rejection doesn’t kill a treaty. Unless the president pulls the plug, or the Senate creates a mechanism to send it back, it lingers on. That, in turn, let the Obama Administration abuse the “object and purpose” rule. They sought to circumvent the Senate by supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution invoking CTBT’s “object and purpose” to effectively prohibit all nuclear testing.
• The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Signed by Mr. Clinton in 1995, the CRC is so obnoxious that it’s never been sent to the Senate. A classic human rights treaty, it’s irrelevant to the actual treatment of children and full of foolish ideas — like the assertion that five-year-olds should have freedom of association. No more picking your kid’s play dates!
• The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Signed by Secretary of State John F. Kerry in 2013, and sent to the Senate in the dying days of the Obama administration, the ATT is a human rights treaty in disguise. It will constrain the arms sales of its democratic signatories, while the world’s dictatorships merrily continue to sell guns to their repressive allies and terrorist proxies.
• The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The U.S. hasn’t signed the Convention, though President Clinton did sign an associated agreement in 1994. UNCLOS contains reasonable and traditional provisions on maritime conduct, but requires the U.S. to bribe other nations to accept these provisions by paying them billions of dollars. Bad idea.
• Inter-American Convention against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and other Related Materials (CIFTA). Signed by Clinton in 1997, CIFTA would require almost every American gun owner to be licensed by the ATF as a firearms manufacturer, a massive expansion of federal power.
Can we get out of these? You bet we can: The sitting president, colloquially put, can “unsign” them. To do this, the president formally states that we’re not going to ratify these treaties, and that we’re therefore not bound by their object and purpose.
Is this legal? You bet it is: We’re a sovereign nation and the right to “unsign” is recognized in international law. Saying that we can’t “unsign” a treaty is akin to saying that treaties are more powerful than our inherent right of self-government.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with treaties: they’re how nations do business. But there is a problem with bad treaties — treaties that don’t work, are one-sided, or are just silly. It’s time to clear the inbox of our bad treaties.
• Ted Bromund is a senior research fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
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