[tsimionescu]

The USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times. Anyone who signs an agreement with the USA should really expect at most 3-4 years of validity, depending where in the election cycle it was signed.

[JumpCrisscross]

> USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times

Uh, not really. We basically have a pattern of countries with excess power-projection capabilities going on a rampage as soon as they can. Russia in Ukraine (and Africa and the Middle East, to say nothing of Europe). China in Tibet and Hong Kong, with the Philippines and entire UNCLOS treaty system and now Taiwan. Saudi Arabia in Yemen and the region; same for Iran and Israel.

The U.S. was sort of with Europe for a few years on trying to hold the rules-based international order together. Now we're jumping into the international-law-doesn't-matter pool.

[tsimionescu]

I'm talking about a slightly separate thing.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, is a massive war crime and against international law (specifically, it's against the international law of aggression, the specific one for which the Nazi leadership were hanged). But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade - Russia last promised in a treaty not to do this in the 1990s, when Ukraine agreed to renounce the nuclear weapons the USSR kept there. So it's *not great", to put it extrmelet mildly, but at least that treaty lasted for 20-30 years.

In contrast, look at the Iran nuclear deal. That went into effect in 2016, and the US unilaterally withdrew from it and reinstated sanctions in 2018, not even two years later (they claimed some breach, but no other party to the treaty agreed that the breach existed, and the EU even tried to block the US sanctions to try to keep the deal going).

Or look at the Paris climate accord, which the US has signed twice and withdrew from twice in the last few years.

Or the USMCA agreement that replaced NAFTA in 2020, which the USA has violated in 2025 by seeking to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada.

And these are just some of the bigger, better known ones, with the clearest terms. Even Trump's actions on Ukraine right now are a clear breach of some less formal deals made by the previous administration a few years ago, when they were urging Ukraine not to seek a quick peace treaty with Russia - but it's less clear there what the deals were and to what extent they've been breached.

Whenever you'll look at a US deal, at least in the past few decades, you'll have a better than 50% chance it was broken by the USA within at most a decade.

Again, this is separate from the new era of ignoring international law by many powerful countries, and it coexists with the times when the USA was one of the biggest proponents of the rule of international law.

[yakshaving_jgt]

> But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade

I don't think that's true. In fact, I think in the last decade (or, 11 years), the russians have done this ~25 times.

A standard russian tactic appears to be to ask the enemy to lay down their weapons, and then when the soldiers comply, the russians shoot them in the face anyway.

Utter barbarians.

- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/07/russia-launche...

- https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/risks-russian-...

- https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/02/24/7499797/

[tsimionescu]

Those are slightly different things than treaties (as the articles you quote show, many of those ceasefires were unilaterally declared by Russia, not the result of an agreement between the two parties). Still, I don't mean in any way to praise Russia here, or even to claim that the USA is just as bad as Russia on this.

As bad as many of the US unilateral cancelations of treaties I mentioned are, they do not in any way compare to the horrifying aggression that Russia is showing in Ukraine, both at the basic level of invading a neighbor to steal their land, and in the details of how they are pursuing this illegitimate goal. Putin and his general are war criminals to a degree that few others in the last decade could be described (Netanyahu and Assad probably being the main "competitors", and Assad was only able to do what he did with Putin's help).

[benmmurphy]

you can expect a country that is controlled by its people voting to be a bit schizo to some degree when it comes to treaties. surely, you cannot expect something that is meant to have large effects on domestic policy like the Paris climate accord to be stable in the US when there is a lot of difference of opinion domestically over it.

[tsimionescu]

Of course you can. If a country commits to signing an international treaty, the normal expectation should be that it considers itself bound by that treaty, for some time at least. A normal president can't just go and overrule the previous president's words unilaterally, for the very simple reason that I illustrated: it makes it impossible to take anything the country signs seriously. Why would anyone accept a compromise deal with Trump on anything that has repercussions beyond 2028 knowing that the next president will just ignore it?

I should note that, on this particular ground, I don't necessarily blame Trump as the one who backed out of the deals. It's very much possible that the blame should rest on Obama for signing a deal he knew had insufficient support in his country and wouldn't be followed through by his successors. If he were an honest man, he wouldn't have signed the deal in this case, even if he believed (as I do) that the deal is critically important for the future of the world. Falsely committing to do the right thing is no less dishonest than going back on a word you gave.

[renata]

Treaties specifically have to be approved by Congress and have approximately the same force of law and durability as the Constitution. Lately we mostly do "executive agreements" instead, which do not require Congressional approval and can pretty much be ignored on a whim by the next president. We could go back to treaties but considering Congress has given up so much of their responsibility to executive agencies because they can't even pass laws, it seems unlikely.

[freeone3000]

This is essentially the same as saying the United States should never be trusted.

[selimthegrim]

I believe Russia signed a border demarcation treaty with Ukraine pretty recently like 2010-12

[tsimionescu]

I couldn't find details on any such agreement, I'd be curious to see it. The only treaty signed between the two countries from that period I could find was the leasing to Russia of the Sevastopol naval base in exchange for preferential gas prices to Ukraine.

Still, to be very clear, I don't mean in any way to claim that Russia has any justification whatsoever for invading Ukraine and stealing their land, with or without some treaty.