1st Edition
Dysfunctional Diplomacy The Politics of International Agreements in an Era of Partisan Polarization
US diplomacy is broken. As a result, the United States sits on the sidelines as the remainder of the world writes international law dealing with a host of vexing problems. The source of the dysfunction is domestic politics. Partisan polarization has rendered the domestic treaty process unworkable. Instead, presidents rely entirely on unilateral tools to complete their agreements, making them far weaker and less legitimate. Using a mixed-methods approach, Peake assesses the politics surrounding treaty ratification and the use of unilateral authority since World War Two, with a particular focus on the twenty-first century. He employs original data from 1949 through 2020, including 1,000 treaties and more than 3,000 executive agreements. The analysis provides case studies of the domestic politics of several recent international agreements, including on climate change, Iranian nuclear weapons, security in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights, and the law of the sea.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 Recent Trends in Treaty Politics
3 The Effects of Partisan Polarization on Treaty Politics
4 The United States on the Outside: Multilateral Conventions
5 Executive Agreements: Implementing US Democracy
6 Weak Commitments: The Limits of Presidential Unilateralism
7 Conclusions
References
Biography
Jeffrey S. Peake is Professor of Political Science at Clemson University, in Clemson, South Carolina, where he teaches courses on US politics, Congress, and U.S. foreign policy.
Praise for Dysfunctional Diplomacy: The Politics of International Agreements in an Era of Partisan Polarization
Jeffrey Peake usefully demonstrates an important but often overlooked consequence of partisan polarization in Congress: it has rendered the treaty process unworkable. Having no option, presidents rely almost entirely on unilateral tools to make international agreements. This dysfunctional practice has weakened the role of Congress, undermined the country’s international commitments, and decreased America’s influence on international law.
George C. Edwards III, Texas A&M University and University of Oxford
No one has more thoroughly documented the decline of the U.S. treaty process than Jeffrey Peake. In this important book, Peake integrates and extends his groundbreaking empirical work on increasing presidential unilateralism in the making of international agreements. And he shows how this trend undermines the democratic legitimacy of international law and adversely impacts U.S. foreign policy. Both political scientists and international law scholars will learn a great deal from Dysfunctional Diplomacy.
Jack Goldsmith, Harvard University Law School
This is one of the most comprehensive and engaging modern accounts of a "lost art"--the politics of treaty ratification—in an era of deep partisanship and polarization in American politics. The rich data analysis in this book, combined with fascinating case studies of the politics of contemporary treaty ratification and the rise of executive agreements, expose key ingredients in our dysfunctional diplomacy. But they also offer us a way out by exposing critical nodes of resistance and challenge in the process.
Jeffrey S. Lantis, The College of Wooster
