From Commitment to Exit: Presidential Power and the Making of International Agreements in the U.S.

• In Event: Great Power Competition

Abstract

International agreements represent a commitment to global cooperation and are a crucial component of diplomacy that shapes the United States' relations with the rest of the world. Treaties affect a vast range of American foreign policies, such as arms control, defense, trade, energy, space exploration, and migration. This paper examines U.S. behavior in signing and exiting international agreements in five key issue areas: security, economic, environment, technology, and human rights. It explores the effect of presidential power and proposes an institutional theory of international commitment-making. Existing IR literature has extensively studied state compliance and violation, but when are countries more likely to enter into those agreements in the first place? What is the practical meaning or implication of signing a treaty? Multiple factors may affect the process of signing international agreements, including presidential priorities, legislative cohesion, and public opinion. Using treaty data, this paper finds evidence that presidents drive the treaty-signing process. Stronger presidents are able to make more agreements that are aligned with their policy priorities with other countries. However, those agreements are also more likely to die over time. Legislative cohesion and public opinion, on the other hand, do not consistently predict U.S. agreement signing. The paper also presents a choice-based sampling method to study treaty withdrawal as a rare event, which can be used to calculate the probability of U.S. treaty exits based on domestic conditions and agreement characteristics.

Author

• Sun Shen, Princeton University