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Trump really ruined it. All I can think about now is, is this another agreement that the US is gonna sign and then bail? When are agreements for real for the U

• jerf 9y ago
  Signing agreements with no intent to enforce them is a universal problem, not a particularly US problem, nor is failing to fully ratify them even after a "signature". The political calculus is simple; you win plaudits from people who pay attention to words over results (which is a LOT of people in politics, including a lot of people in charge of money flow), and signatures are cheap, results are expensive. There's a lot of signing things that don't ever happen. In general when I hear about an international agreement, I tend to assume it's a no-op until proved further. You can't even get international cooperation with something as economically beneficial to its participants as OPEC, let alone things bigger than that and with fewer positive monetary implications.
• jcranmer 9y ago
  It was actually George's administration that changed ratification from merely being a pro forma process to a meaningful step of legislative oversight. George Washington, that is. This was done because neither the president nor Senate were happy with having the Senate be involved in the entire treaty-making process, and so they switched to the ratification step to fulfill the requirements in the Constitution to adhere to the "advice and consent of the Senate" rules. Other nations, as they gained parliamentary democracies, saw what the US did here and adopted it in their legislative practices.