By Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden | 21 October 2026 (IDN) – The US Senate—usually the Republican members—rejects multilateral treaties as if it were a sport. Others it rejects through inaction—the Law of the Sea Treaty, for example, negotiated under President Jimmy Carter and fruitlessly pushed for ratification by every president since. Republicans justify their blocking tactics by arguing that such treaties threaten sovereignty.
However, after almighty struggles—it takes only one third of the Senate to block a treaty—the important nuclear arms treaties with the Soviet Union and Russia were ratified. So was the Convention against Torture, which Republican President Ronald Reagan successfully fought for but which President George Bush junior illegally ignored, without a word of protest from Congress or most of the media. His vice-president, Dick Cheney, became torturer-in-chief and should have been arrested by the incoming Obama Administration. But Obama, wanting a peaceful life with Congress for the sake of future legislation, decided not to prosecute the torturers.
When Ratification Makes a Difference
In October 2013, Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Treaty that the US has long been a party to.
The US must be glad it did ratify it. Once it did, a flood of other countries immediately followed. Without that ratification, there would have been no deal with Russia on abolishing Syria’s chemical stocks. Nor would the Nobel-prize-winning Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons be at work dismantling those stocks today. Everyone, including the Syrians, would have said why should they do anything if America doesn’t itself have dismantled most of its own large stocks, and so has Russia.
But, by and large, the US stalls on treaty ratification even though it was involved in the negotiations, often playing a benign and crucial role. One example is the Convention on the Rights of the Child—the US is the only country that has not ratified it. Yet the Convention captures the essence of basic civic behaviour, and its principal conceptualiser was a fine American, James Grant, who for many years was the director-general of UNICEF. Another treaty it sabotaged by withdrawing this year was the climate change treaty.
“Stealth Multilateralism”
However, in more recent years, the Clinton, Obama, and even the Bush administrations found ways to circumvent the Senate, sometimes even exercising leadership. In a Foreign Affairs article, David Kaye called this “stealth multilateralism”.
With the Law of the Sea, which codified customary rules governing the extent of a state’s sovereignty over its territorial seas, rights of passage, seabed resource allocation, illegal fishing, and much more, the US acts as if it were binding. In contrast, China, which has ratified it, seems to be ignoring it in the South China Sea disputes, and both Iran and the US have essentially ignored it in their argument over free passage in the Straits of Hormuz.
The US has refused to ratify the 1988 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court. Not surprisingly, some delegates at the African Union have wondered aloud why they should remain members of the ICC when the US isn’t.
Ironic, isn’t it, when Bush junior took office; he went out of his way to sabotage the treaty. Later, realising how useful it was, he changed tack and began to work with it, even consenting to a UN Security Council resolution that referred Sudan to the ICC. Obama did the same, only more so. Obama offered million-dollar rewards for information leading to the arrest of ICC fugitives. After a Congolese warlord presented himself to the US embassy in Rwanda in March, the US quickly transferred him to be detained by the ICC in The Hague. Professor Kaye writes, “The US has arguably become the court’s most staunch supporter”.
Following Treaties Without Joining Them
Likewise, the US has given significant support to the non-ratified Convention on Tobacco Control. US law has been aligned with the Convention. In 1997, the Ottawa Treaty outlawed land mines. The Pentagon opposed it because mines were critical to keeping the peace on the Korean peninsula. In practice, apart from Korea, the US has scrupulously avoided producing, transferring or deploying mines. It leads the world in de-mining projects. It has even helped pay part of the costs of meetings of the treaty’s parties; nevertheless, this approach has serious flaws. With the ICC, it has made it impossible—if ever it was likely—to detain members of the US armed forces for war crimes, even though American courts have mostly acted unsatisfactorily by ICC standards.
Challenges such as climate change are best addressed through ratifying treaties. Many global solutions require the binding force and permanence that only treaties can provide. Needless to say, President Donald Trump has been consistently opposed to more treaties and has dismantled the arms control treaties with Russia.
The US has lived with its moral ambiguities for so long that only a great heroic shove will wake it up. For that, we have to wait for the next general election when, hopefully, a more constructive president is elected. (IDN-InDepthNews)
Copyright: Jonathan Power.